Category Archives: New Utopia

Utopias are not, by definition, found on this side of paradise. Yet that truth hasnt stopped visionaries and seekersnot to mention knaves and foolsfrom trying to build communities on lofty principles and quixotic aspirations. One such wonderland is Auroville, a commune in Indias Tamil south whose heady origins can be traced to the incense-and-raga days of the 1960s. Akash Kapurs Better to Have Gone (Scribner, 344 pages, $27) is a haunting and elegant account of this attempt at utopia and of his familys deep connections to it.

Established in 1968 by a Frenchwoman with a God-complex, Auroville is a place committed to human unity and fostering evolution. Its first residents comprised a few hundred people from France, Germany and the U.S. and a sprinkling of other Europeansmost of them hippie-refugees from Western materialismas well as like-minded Indians. Today, 53 years later, its population stands at some 2,500. Few intentional communitiesnow, or everhave survived that long, writes Mr. Kapur. The world militates against . . . anywhere that tries to play by different rules.

The word Auroville was derived from auroreFrench for dawnwith a convenient echo, also, of the name of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian guru born in 1872. Mirra Alfassa, the Frenchwoman-founder, became Aurobindos acolyte in 1920 and his spiritual successor when he died in 1950. Alfassa came to be addressed by everyone as the Mother, and there was even an Indian postage stamp issued in her honor.

According to the Mothers founding charter, this City of Dawn belonged to nobody in particular but to humanity as a whole. To live in Auroville, one had to be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, and each resident was vetted personally by the Mother. Although she is still revered in Indiawhere obeisance is accorded much too easily to anyone with spiritual pretensesits hard not to regard the Mother as a charlatan. Auroville, in her words, was a place where the embryo or seed of the future supramental world might be created. And it was no secret that she craved immortality.

Mr. Kapur and his wife, Auralicea name given to her by the Mother, who asserted the right to name all children born to her flockboth grew up in Auroville. Auralice was born in 1972, Mr. Kapur two years later. Auralices mother, Diane Maes, was a woman from rural Flanders whod arrived at Auroville as an 18-year-old. Headstrong and flirtatious, she soon separated from the biological father of her daughter and took up with another Auroville man named John Walker, in many ways the books most compelling (and infuriating) character.

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Better to Have Gone Review: Dawn of a New Humanity - The Wall Street Journal

What is the N.H. Freedom Caucus and how did they hold the Republican Legislature hostage?

Over time, Free Staters moved to New Hampshire, dressed as Republicans and gained enough seats to tie the hands of Gov. Chris Sununu until he conceded to limit his Emergency Power Orders and flip on divisive concepts. Sununu signed the first Freedom Caucus budget in N.H. history in the shameful hours of night, with no press. Sununu was played.

An April 8 press release titled, House Freedom Caucus Celebrates Budget Victory, the N.H. House Freedom Caucus website explains their motives, one term shouts out like a warning. They dont refer to government in common Republican phrasing limited government, they write, from under the heel of government a foreboding insight.

The Freedom Caucus, working from within government, strives for an anarchist utopia where citizens live as they please. Working from within, their goal is to bring down central and local governmental control starting with inciting racial resentment in local schools.

Nationally, the U.S. Congressional Freedom Caucus endorsed extremist Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) for Congress. The majority of N.H. Republicans chose Free Stater Jason Osborne as their majority leader. His extreme views are reflected in his deep involvement with the School Sucks Project, which aims to do away with all schools public and private. He is succeeding here in New Hampshire. The GOP passed the budget which provides more than $4,000 per child for anyone who already has or wants to pull their children from public school.

The Freedom Caucus vision for an anarchist utopia took a giant step forward thanks to the GOP dominated House and Senate and a tied up Gov. Sununu.

Will New Hampshire become the first Freedom Caucus anarchist utopia? Your votes will help determine the answer.

Originally posted here:

Annie Robbins: Will N.H. become the first Freedom Caucus anarchist utopia? - Conway Daily Sun

The Olympics opening ceremonies in Tokyo featured one of the worst pop songs of all time: Yes, Im speaking of John Lennons Imagine, sung by a large childrens choir and a bevy of celebrities.

As a fan of the Beatles and Lennon especially, it pains me to say this, but its true: While its melody and arrangement are indeed beautiful, the lyrics are an invitation to moral and political chaos.

Consider the opening verse: Imagine theres no heaven / Its easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky / Imagine all the people livin for today.

I frankly cant imagine anything worse. To say that there is no heaven or hell is to say that there is no absolute criterion of good and evil no way of meaningfully determining the difference between right and wrong, no standard outside of the subjectivities of each moral actor by which to say any one agent is better than any other.

If you doubt the convictions of a Roman Catholic bishop, take a good hard look at the tens of millions of corpses piled up in the last century by people who took very seriously the proposition that there is no hell below us; above us only sky.

What about livin for today? Wouldnt a world in which we all just live for today be a utopia? Yes, it would, but remember that utopia means, literally, not a place. We can dream about such a society, but we should have the common sense to understand that it will never come true, through our efforts, this side of heaven.

In fact, when we convince ourselves that we can produce heaven on Earth as so many revolutionaries and dreamers of the last 200 years have done then we actually produce something much more like hell on Earth.

Next: Imagine theres no countries / It isnt hard to do / Nothin to kill or die for / And no religion, too. I could only smile as the choir and celebrities sang these words just after the parade of nations attending the Olympics.

To dream of getting rid of separate nations is to dream of erasing human difference. There is nothing wrong with the existence of separate countries, and sometimes its necessary to fight and die for ones country, when its unjustly threatened. To defend this human reality isnt to succumb to mindless nationalism.

To dream of getting rid of religion is worse still. It has been a commonplace among secularists for at least three centuries that religion is at the root of most of our conflicts. But objective studies reveal that something in the neighborhood of 6 percent of all the wars for which we have documented evidence were caused principally by religion. Far more deadly have been nationalism, economic rivalry, tribal disputes, colonial conflicts and perhaps especially atheistic ideologies.

I confess that I couldnt suppress guffaws when I heard the celebrities sing the final verse: Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.

The ones expressing these sentiments with such emotion were, without exception, multimillionaires with, I daresay, lots of possessions. Well, I think that the rest of us should give away our possessions the minute they give away theirs and I dont think we should hold our collective breath.

Once again, the problem isnt owning things per se; its lacking the moral vision to subordinate what one possesses to the common good.

As for the very last verse, about the brotherhood of man: That is, indeed, a beautiful thing to dream of. But we must attend to the simple, logical point that there can be no authentic brotherhood of humanity in the absence of a common Father. We cant be siblings unless we come forth together from the same divine Source.

Simply put, you cant have the brotherhood of man if there is no heaven, if there is no religion, if there is no God.

So go ahead and enjoy the tune of Imagine, but please dont abide by the lyrics.

Robert Barron is the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles.

Twitter: @BishopBarron

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John Lennon's 'Imagine,' blared at the Olympics, is a totalitarian's anthem - New York Post

Grimes has debuted a number of new songs during a set for Australian virtual reality festival Splendour XR.

During the set at 3.30pm BST Sunday July 25 (12.30am AEST Monday July 26), dubbed the Grimes Metaverse (Super Beta) set, the artist played five unreleased tracks: Shinigami Eyes, Love Is A Drug From God with Chris Lake, 100 Percent Tragedy, Utopia and Player of Games. A number of the tracks had previously been teased by Grimes on social media.

The set was also streamed on her Discord server. Listen to the full set below:

On 100 Percent Tragedy, Grimes explained on Discord the track was about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life, referencing a 2018 incident when Banks allegedly spent days at Elon Musks house, making accusations against him on social media.

As Stereogum reports, Banks was quick to respond to the new song, saying Grimes def has some psychosexual obsession with me.

I think its bitterness cuz she doesnt have the musical capacity I have. Everything she does is out of pretentiousness and it comes out like that while everything I do is out of natural swag & geniusness lmaoo, she said in a now-deleted Instagram story.

Starting to notice all the weird undercover millennial racists hide out on Discord.

In earlier months, Grimes has described her follow-up to 2020s Miss Anthropocene as a space opera centred around a lesbian AI being.

Its a space opera about CLAIRE DE LUNE an artificial courtesan who was implanted in a simulation that is a memory of the AI creation story on earth from the brain of the engineer who invented AI because he wants to re live his life but see if his perfect dream girl could teach him to love and thereby he would preserve humanity this time rather than let them fade into obscurity overcome by the machines, Grimes said.

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Grimes says her new song is about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life - NME

In 2015, South Korean professor Jaeweon Cho hit upon a plan to revolutionise economics by commodifying human excreta. Powders derived from poop, he suggested, could act as fertilisers and biofuel, supplying food to microorganisms. This was the basis of his dream of fSM or Fecal Standard Money, which would create a modern society not based on traditional money.

Four years later, Chos seemingly esoteric idea inspired a virtual currency experiment 6,000 kilometers in Auroville, the 3,000-person international township of communal, spiritual living in Tamil Nadu.

Since late 2019, every Aurovillian who downloaded a mobile application has received 12 auras. Three auras of this allotment must be utilised in a select network of other Aurovillians. To discourage hoarding and keep the currency in circulation, auras depreciate by 9% every day.

Its very much in the Auroville spirit, said S Venkatakrishnan, who works as a Tamil translator and is one of the 400 users of the app. He uses the app to exchange his gardening and kitchen supplies. Others offer gardening lessons, a trip to the beach with friends or homemade food.

The new currency has been viewed with both enthusiasm and disappointment. In some way, residents say, the aura is emblematic of the rocky economics of Auroville itself, a work-in-progress marked by numerous attempts at renewal.

Auroville was founded in 1968 when 200 people from 20 countries settled in an arid stretch of land in Tamil Nadus Viluppuram district, ten kilometers north of Pondicherry. Following the vision of Mirra Alfassa, a French associate of the spiritual teacher Aurobindo who they call The Mother, they aimed to create a community without private property or exchange of money.

Their philosophy emphasised collective ownership of resources and sustainable living. They planned to support the settlement through a range of small-scale enterprises. Traditional market and management theories were put to the test.

Money, Alfassa had said in 1938, is not meant to make money. She explained: ... Like all forces and all powers, it is by movement and circulation that it grows and increases its power, not by accumulation and stagnation ... What we may call the reign of money is drawing to its close.

Still, it was not going to be easy, she warned. ...the transitional period between the arrangement that has existed in the world till now and the one to come (in a hundred years, for instance), that period is going to be very difficult, she wrote.

Since the inception of the settlement, Aurovillians have undertaken several experiments at achieving a money-less society. They piloted free distribution centres for necessities, a communal pot of money dispensed by a central administration and a basic income provided for those who work in the town. For many in the community, the schemes either enabled a weak economic foundation or shifted the town further away from its dream of a cashless society.

Eight decades after Auroville began, settlement member Hye Jeong Heo heard about Chos idea of Fecal Standard Money on a South Korean media programme. In 2018, Heo met with Cho and his team to explain the ideals of Auroville.

Even though there are different characters, I thought there are commonalities between the Auroville [idea] of money and fSM, said Cho, an environmental engineering professor and director of the Science Walden Center at South Koreas Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.

At the heart of Chos plan was a toilet that converts human waste into fertilisers and biofuel. By loading powders into reactors that supply food for microorganisms, people would receive Fecal Standard Money that could be used in a market system, perhaps in parallel to existing trading systems.

Feces, like gold, is limited and precious, he wrote in Edge, an avant-garde technology publication. Nobody can make more than a certain limit, and it can be converted to energy.

Cho thought of this as a form of Circular Basic Income, an echo of the increasingly popular idea of Universal Basic Income: a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement, according to the Basic Income Earth Network.

It was Heos daughter, 27-year-old Dan Be Kim who decided to push the idea of Fecal Standard Money in Auroville. She had left the settlement at 17 in 2011 because of a medical condition, but returned in early 2019 to begin a feasibility study on the new currency.

However, a high tech toilet was where we lost a lot of people, she said over a video call from Berlin, where she now lives. There was interest and hesitation, she said, but it was clear that Auroville wasnt ready for a copy paste of fSM. Her team of four re-molded the idea of Fecal Standard Money into the digital aura.

Aura takes its traits from fSM, Cho told Scroll.in in an email. It is, he said, a distinct unit of account, a rusting/disappearing money that depreciates at 9% a day and involves sharing a portion of the allotment with peers in the system.

...Both are twins with different names and separate platforms, but with the same origin and philosophy, he said.

Still, there were bumps along the way. During the research phase, questions were raised in the Auroville community. Why not just do a pure barter? Why do we need any exchange at all? Why have money at all?

It took moving mountains, said Kim.

In a presentation of the idea at Aurovilles Future School in 2019, the teachers, whose classes Kim had sat in long before, were among the most reluctant they told her that the aura wasnt going to work, that plenty of experiments had already been tried.

There is this syndrome because of a repeating pattern of experiments in Auroville where each time they think they are reinventing the wheel, said Kim. Everyone has their niche projects going on, a lot of pioneer groups, they think thats the way to move forward, and then they burn out from the burden of the past.

Kim began to reframe the premise of her project using the language of Auroville. Instead of using the words buy and sell, participants would offer and receive. Instead of products, they focused on the untapped, human collective potential of Auroville space, skills, time.

Its not a tangible value that you can touch, said Kim. Its a spiritual, collective value. We finally got to a point where we could explain that.

With a major launch at the end of 2019, the aura app, created by a team of Aurovillians and nearby volunteers, was available for any registered resident of Auroville, regardless of what work they did or didnt do.

Because the pricing of items, tasks and actions are determined by the users themselves, there is not consistent value. It has to be something ethereal, said 80-year-old Bill Sullivan, who was one of the first Aurovillians five decades ago and worked closely with Kim on the aura. You could give your motor bike for 1 aura or a mango for 100 aura. We have to break those fixed values. Things dont have a value in and of itself its all in the mind. We dont want to reduplicate old economic models.

Kim added: Aura is an alternative currency that does not strictly depend on market-determined prices It is a thought/social experiment to see how people will go about valuing their offerings on the platform when given the freedom with unconditional endowments.

This, she said, is one of the most interesting aspects of research that can be done on user-generated data: Do people value specific goods and services in a specific range when there is the absence of price comparisons or references?

A brochure for the app reads: The aura creates a space for a circular economy where things considered waste, or things that are not being purposed, can first be identified and then upcycled and repurposed.

It states: For money to flow, money must be a means and not an end ... Money as a tool is not intended for accumulation, but rather circulation, it states, echoing Alfassas ideas.

But just as congratulatory comments began flowing in, the application began crashing.

Its been a tremendous problem, said Sullivan, who is known in Auroville as B. At first, it was just for a day or two at a time, but in February this year, the application went down for two weeks.

Weve had a challenge with our developers so we have to focus on getting the app to work well, said Sullivan. We are hoping for more funding from Korea and then we can convince the market and stores in Auroville to use it.

Funded by Chos centre in South Korea, the grant has not been adequate to cover a full-blown technology overhaul so the team is looking for external funding for maintenance costs, Kim said.

When Kim was conducting her research on Auroville, many people told her that Aurovilles economy was unequal, overly bureaucratic with too much talking and not acting, tending towards capitalism, and unsustainable. While this sparked the idea to create an alternative system, the fragile foundations of the communitys economy may be the ideas very undoing.

The issue with Aurovilles economy is its not self-sufficient, said Kim. Its reliant on external sources. Its a problem that has plagued the settlement from its inception.

In its quest to create a settlement free from money, Auroville is a human laboratory. Whether it is nearer or farther from its ideals depends on who you speak to.

Auroville has always been trying to get rid of money, said Manuel Thomas, a chartered accountant from Chennai who co-wrote an economic history of Auroville titled Economics of Earth and People: The Auroville Case 1968 to 2008 and continues to be a consultant for the community. They keep experimenting, but in all these years, there has not been a no-cash economy.

At its inception, Auroville received a periodic Prosperity bundle of clothing, toiletries and other basic needs from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. After the Mother died in 1973, Aurovillians developed differences with the Sri Aurobindo Society. The Central government got involved, leading to a Parliamentary Act that handed over ownership rights to the Auroville Foundation.

The Auroville Foundation owns most of the land, buildings and assets, as Thomas book notes. The community has an international advisory council (similar to a board of directors), a governing board (a top management team appointed by the Indian government) and a residents assembly.

The introduction of the Maintenance system in 1983, which is still in place today, proved to be one of the most controversial moments in the communitys history, said Suryamayi Aswini who did her PhD thesis at Sussex University about the township.

Aurovillians who work in specific jobs receive a monthly stipend in their individual account. One third of Maintenances are received as cash credits that can be exchanged for rupees, while the rest acts as a local currency only usable for goods and services in Auroville. Some Aurovillians receive up to Rs 20,000 per month as a Maintenance, while half of Aurovillians dont receive any money because they determine themselves to be self-supporting.

The settlements major earnings come from micro and small enterprises (known as units) that are mainly involved in handicrafts, textiles, clothing and food. One of its largest employers and economic contributors is Maroma, a fragrance and body care products brand. Other major units include Sunlit Future, a solar grid system, and boutiques such as Kalki and Mira Boutique.

A Central fund (now called the City Services Budget) collects government grants and individual donations as well as earnings from Auroville units. Residents pay a standard monthly contribution, which started at Rs 200 in 1989 and grew to Rs 3,150 in 2018. Volunteers in Auroville have to contribute Rs 900 a month. An additional 20% of visitors accommodation fees is collected in the common budget.

Most of it is allocated to city expenses, the bulk of which goes to Maintenances and education. Aurovilles turnover in 2016-17 was Rs 337 crore. City services receipts for 2016 to 2017 amounted to Rs 19.5 crore, said Thomas, while Rs 51 crore was from grants and donations,.

The monthly City Services Budget, published in Aurovilles News and Notes Letter, stated that the town had a monthly loss of Rs 53 lakh in June 2021. Its internal contributions amounted to Rs 1.3 crore (the majority of which came from its commercial units and services) and its payments amounted to Rs 1.8 crore (of which Rs 34 lakh went to education).

In the early 1990s, those disappointed with the Maintenance system created Seed, a common account in which a small group of residents compiled their Maintenance and private funds to be disbursed back out by an administrator. This grew to other groups and became known as the Circles experiment. It started out full of people, idealism, enthusiasm, but failed to successfully take root, Aswini wrote.

In 2006, another experiment was attempted with Prosperity, a fund that acted more like insurance for times in need. But that fell apart as well.

In 1999, Thomas and a team set out to gather income and expenditure statements and balance sheets to be consolidated into a database, a task that was not only more arduous than assumed but also illuminated the dire state of Aurovilles affairs.

In 2002, the team released a White Paper showing that the contributions of Aurovilles commercial units per capita had dipped significantly in the previous decades. The paper encouraged the settlement to invest more into its commercial sectors to bolster income generation.

Manuel, who is currently updating his account of the settlements economic history, said that Aurovilles dependence on grants and donations seems to have reduced. Even though every experiment runs up against reality, he sees progress.

Basically, the aura is another experiment coming out of the Circles experiments a no cash philosophy, Maneul said. In the end, its still a medium of exchange and a form of informal money. But you are likely not to become an aura millionaire. Its the negative aspects of money that they are trying to avoid.

Henk Thomas, who lived in Auroville three decades ago and Manuels co-author, had a more sceptical take: Its high ideological content without solid thinking. In my view, its not very important or interesting because it covers such a small part of the economy. Henk said the aura is yet further evidence that the township never took heed of the advice contained in his book with Manuel.

There are endless experiments in Auroville and they all fail because in the end, there is a deficit, he said. The same questions come back again and again without new answers. I find it a tragedy that there is so much talent there, all kinds of people thinking from scratch and it dies out because there is no economic authority.

In 2017, Sullivan, who had helped Kim with the virtual currency programme, attempted an economic innovation of his own. He created physical notes out of waste paper with one note valued at Rs 100, exchangeable at Aurovilles Financial Service (which holds the individual financial accounts of Aurovillians and manages the Maintenances). He called one note an aura.

It was his attempt to revise the whole economy, but no one took it seriously, he said. ... Still, maybe [the first aura] broke through something that was a little bit stuck. Maybe those events helped prepare people for this aura.

Sullivan firmly believes that the critics will be proven wrong. In Auroville, you can find someone against everything, he said. This is a quantum leap to something totally different. Weve crossed a threshold and were committed. Weve tried all these other big things. The common pots, the circles. I was a part of them and they didnt really take off.

But the smartphone, he said, is the revolutionary leap that Auroville economics needed.

Manuel is among those keenly watching the aura experiment. He said: The thing with Auroville is it doesnt give up.

Karishma Mehrotra is an independent journalist. She is a Kalpalata Fellow for Technology Writings for 2021.

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In quest for utopia, Auroville hopes that it can create a society without money using an app - Scroll.in

The pandemic has affected our sex lives in many unusual ways, but perhaps none more unusual than this development: The coronavirus has highlighted the possible public-health benefits of glory holes. Sexual positions that make use of walls as physical barriers have long been considered niche. But when the New York City Department of Health recommended them last month as part of a push for safer sex, it tapped into a question that many of us have been asking: How do you seek sexual satisfaction during a global health crisis?

I havent had sex in more than a year, mostly because I took COVID-19 very seriously. I disconnected from the public sphere. No one visited my apartment. I disinfected my groceries and covered my apartments air vents with trash bags. As a queer person, I could barely register the idea of sex while living alongside a deadly virus that nobody really understood. One study published early in the pandemic showed that 43.5 percent of people reported a decrease in the quality of their sex life. Among study participants, they had fewer sexual encounters with other people, and even masturbated less often.

But queer and trans people have a rich history of pursuing pleasure, especially during dark times when that very pursuit is dangerous, even illegal. This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans peopleespecially those of colorlive under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety. In spite of this reality, queer and trans people have innovated not by waiting for the future to get better, but by prioritizing the urgency of feeling pleasure right here, right now. So I knew that some of us would create novel pathways around the pandemics roadblocks to sex. I also knew that as the world reopened and Grindr profiles got fired up again, queer innovators would bring the kinks learned during quarantine into their post-vaccine encounters with other people.

Read: The Pride flag has a representation problem

In a time when touch has been so limited, some people have been moving toward a future full of bold new pleasures. Alex Jenny, a therapist based in Chicago, told me she joined a nude-sharing group chat, started an OnlyFans page, and began having sex online. In Virginia, where I live, one friend sauntered over to a lovers doorstep one night wearing a mask and nitrile gloves, picked up a Speedo sealed in a ziplock bag, went home to do a photoshoot in the swimwear, and sent his beau the photos and videos. Many people are reimagining their own boundaries, thinking of this period of virtual intimacies, of distance and little physical contact, not as a lack but instead as a sort of edge play through sexual self-discovery.

For Julian Kevon Glover, an assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and womens studies at Virginia Commonwealth University whos writing a book about the nuances of nonmonogamy, that meant attending an online sex party with her primary partner. [My partner and I] played on camera with a group of like-minded folk and it was much hotter than I ever expected, she told me. Ive learned that queer people are and will always remain quite as horny, and we are inventive.

Though the pandemic necessitated screen-based intimacy for some, queer people have always used the internet as a place to navigate their sexuality. During the late 1990s and into the early aughts, I spent more time than I care to admit navigating chat rooms on gay.com and Manhunt, where I pointed and clicked my way to some of my first sexual experiences. But I wasnt looking only for sex. Growing up as a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, during the era of frosted blond tips, white-seashell necklaces, and Abercrombie & Fitch, I was hoping to connect with anyone who could help me not feel so alone. The researcher David F. Shaw talked about this form of online intimacy, or computer-mediated communication, as the uncharted territories of cyberspace where men sit alone at their keyboards producing and inscribing themselves within interactive texts of homosexual desire and need. Historically, gay online forums have been so widespread that a 1994 Wired top-10 list noted that of the most popular chat rooms created on AOL, three were for gay men, one was for lesbians, and one was for swingers.

Read: The coronavirus is testing queer culture

Part of the reason queer sex thrives online is because of the internets covert nature. Prior to the webs easy anonymity, queer people had to seek sly ways to court sex in front of other people without being detected. The hanky code of the 70s and 80s, an elaborate system of discreet communication wherein people put different colored hankerchiefs in their right or left pockets to indicate sexual interests, allowed queer people to speak about kink in plain sight without words. Craigslist, which most people know as a place to find an apartment or a piece of furniture, was for many queer people a vibrant place to find sex before the Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts of 2018. The list of ways to hook up goes on: sultry personal ads in the back pages of gay publications such as XY and Ttu, dating sites such as Grindr, and now, the Zoom sex parties of the coronavirus era.

These arenas have facilitated cultural practices that the anthropologist Shaka McGlotten calls virtual intimacies, or feelings of connection mediated by communication technology. I was amazed by how swiftly queer nightlife and sex worlds moved to Zoom, but Aurora Higgs, a queer Ph.D. student, artist, and performer from Richmond, Virginia, says that the required shift to online events ended up feeling more liberating than in-person shows. In Virginia, liquor laws limit activity in mixed-beverage establishments, including how much skin dancers can show, which clothing items can be removed, and how dancers can remove them. But the brilliant thing about online burlesque, Higgs told me, was that there was no bar. We were able to do stuff we werent able to do before, things like nudity, she said. It was interesting to see how people were utilizing their own spaces at home to dip us further into the fantasy.

Higgs told me that she plans to start a website where she can do cam work and online kink photography. As a Black trans woman, I sometimes feel like everyone has access to my sexuality but me. Im expected to be passively content at the end of a violent gaze, with little opportunity to turn my gaze on to others or on myself, she said. With camming and virtual shows, the gaze that normally violates me is temporarily being used at my discretion.

Even though sex can now take place in real life again for some, many queer and trans peoplewho have long dealt with the reality of HIV/AIDSmust navigate transparency about sexual health with the added complication of COVID-19. Trust is the currency that will shape how queer and trans people approach hooking up in a post-vaccine summer, Ayo Dawkins, an artist from Virginia, told me. Not that I trusted everyone I was with pre-pandemic, they said. But I knew sex wouldnt kill you. You have condoms to protect you from STDs and STIs, and you have Truvada (PrEP) to protect you from HIV, but nothing could protect you from COVID aerosols. Today, with new questions to ask about sexual-health statuses, some queer people may favor a more curated approach to sex that relies heavily on closed sexual networks.

In many ways, the past year and a half of sexual distancing, online intimacy, and exploration of pleasures has been a rehearsal for a yet-to-be-imagined queer sexual ecosystem. One of my favorite passages from the book Cruising Utopia, by the theorist Jos Muoz, reads: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present, which is to say that queerness might be the longing for a better world to come. I always say that creativity and innovation stem from the margins, from those who are resisting the kind of flattened human experience that comes from being denied access. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, its how to foreground the importance of feeling as a means of survival.

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The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex - The Atlantic

President Star Parker of the Center for Urban Renewal Education has accused President Biden of not promoting an abolitionist education network after the radical group was linked to the new semester coronavirus handbook. Parker told the American Newsroom Thursday that educators under the administration are trying to turn our country into a Marxist utopia.

Star Parker: Well, the crumbs are all over your face. Your hands are still in the jar, but you havent eaten the cookies. Of course, they would deny that they are trying to transform our country into a Marxist utopia. I think its time for conservatives to admit that the collectivist government that controls the funded national education system is no longer functioning.

The CRT Group, promoted by BIDEN ADMIN, is associated with the best education officials

As we are divided in half, its time for money to chase children to the school their parents want. In other words, our society is unleashed, and civil society is unleashed because of the collapse of our common culture. We are no longer one unit. We are worldly and sacred. The sacred believe in personal responsibility. The world believes in groupism. So this is not the place where we pretend we can push all our children into one environment and teach them all kinds of values that are consistent with each other.

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Bidens Ministry of Education will deny trying to turn the United States into a Marxist utopia: Star Parker

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Princess Zelda finally got to star in her own game in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD (Switch)By: Nintendo

MUCH like reusing last year's half-charred birthday candles, Nintendo is celebrating Zelda's 35th year with the same game they used to mark the adventure series' 25th anniversary back in 2011.

The last of the old-school Zeldas, 2011's Skyward Sword released in the Wii's twilight, making much of the console's waggling long after the motion control novelty had worn off. Yet despite wilting in the shadow of its successor, the mighty Breath of the Wild, Skyward Sword has plenty to love especially in this bells and whistles do-over for the Switch.

After a quarter century focusing on an elfin boy named Link, Skyward Sword's water-coloured fairytale was the first game to focus on the series' titular Princess Zelda. Set in the floating utopia of Skyloft, when our abduction-prone princess is kidnapped, young Link travels to the terra firma land of Hyrule, haunted sword in hand, to rescue her.

The game still looks good in this portable conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps

A treasure trove of side quests, Skyward Sword's environment gradually revealed new secrets as you acquired the toys to explore it. Its motion controls put literal new twists on an old fairy tale. Many enemies became puzzles in themselves, requiring specific directional strikes to vanquish, while your weapon could be powered up by holding the controller aloft, a la He-Man.

Using the doodles of Paul Cezanne as inspiration, its impressionist visuals disguised the Wii's limitations a canny artistic choice that means the game still looks good in this portable 'Loft conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps.

Other quality of life improvements include a fully controllable camera oddly absent in the original which makes exploration much more enjoyable. With auto-saves, there's no more trudging to back up your progress, while the whole shebang runs at a faster clip thanks to skippable cut-scenes and your talking sword, Fi, doing a lot less talking.

Of course, the biggest change is to the controls. Given the original was custom-made for the Wii's bespoke Motionplus controller, playing on-the-go now relegates all its motion nonsense to traditional button presses. It's a clumsy compromise, and purists after the Wii experience will find it much more intuitive to play on the telly, where the console's Joy Cons even manage to outdo the original in the accuracy stakes.

Unfortunately, Nintendo have locked Skyward Sword HD's most useful tweak behind a plastic paywall. By tapping Zelda Amiibos to the Switch, players can zip between the game's overworld and surface at will a time-saving feature not available in the original.

It's peak Nintendo to charge 50 for an updated 10-year-old game then hide its biggest improvement behind a 25 toy.

Dodgy business practices aside, Skyward Sword's charms have lost none of their lustre. After the game-changing open-world bounty of Breath of The Wild, there's a whiff of the relic to Nintendo's latest but as a nostalgic stop-gap until its sequel lands, you could do a lot worse than the Wii's final hurrah.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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Games: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD still offers plenty to love in new HD do-over for the Switch - The Irish News

To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It promised to produce order out of a religiously and linguistically mixed society. It promised a homeland to those out-of-place in nationalist India.

Many who moved did so out of faith in this project, out of conviction, at times against the wishes of their families (most famously, Jinnahs only daughter did not move). Indeed, the deliberate sacrifice of home and bonds was the price that made the result participation in the creation of a new nation-state all the more sacred. (See oral histories in Anam Zakaria, Footprints of Partition. On Pakistan as a utopian ideal, see also Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

The poet credited with launching the Pakistan movement, Muhammad Iqbal, was shaped by education in Germany and Britain. Among his closest friends in Lahore from 1932 was Muhammad Asad, the Austro-Hungarian Jew who opposed Zionism but supported the creation of a Muslim state in South Asia. He had been an advisor to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in the 1920s one of that world of European spies in Arabia I described in my first book.

Like them, he collapsed the tasks of reinventing the Middle East and himself. He would go on to shape Pakistans constitution and head the Middle East Division of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My point in invoking Asad is to highlight the cosmopolitan intellectual context in which the idea of Pakistan took shape, however much it was also about the local mission of saving Muslims from domination by non-Muslims.

Enlightenment and romantic notions are dialectically related in this intellectual history. I am merely skimming the surface here, focusing on the chain of influences and sociological bonds to offer a sense of the global production and payoff of these ideas over time, up to our present, as we shall see.

In promising a national homeland for South Asias Muslims, Iqbals Pakistan also tried to move beyond nationalism. It was utopic in that ambition, too. Like Tagore, Iqbal denounced the European modernity exposed on the Western Front, the way competitive nationalism produced militarism, imperialism, and indifference to religion. His call for Pakistan was intended as a critique of nationalism and an important first step towards a post-nationalistic postwar world.

Muslim political autonomy would foster in one place a less divided and exploitative society on the basis of an Islamic moral system that would serve Muslims and non-Muslims alike. His notions of the unity of Islam were authentically his but also shaped by romantic orientalist notions he absorbed in Europe. (Barbara Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and Indias Freedom.)

Indeed, although we take Partition as synonymous with the mass migration it entailed, mass migration was not part of the plan, even as late as the early 1940s. The idea was rather to create autonomous Muslim-majority areas in which Hindus and Sikhs would remain, while Muslims would remain in areas in which they were minorities.

Then came the idea of splitting Muslim-majority provinces. The idea of mass eviction and migration only came in March 1947 when riots in Rawalpindi enforced the notion that minorities did not belong in the lands that had now been designated Muslim or non-Muslim (Pandey). In the 1930s, Iqbal was thinking outside the box of nationalism, whatever the ironic appropriation of his goal for nationalistic purposes.

The India that was to result from the creation of Pakistan was also imagined through the lens of modern rationality. Even Indians who regret Partition speak approvingly of a purer nation formed through the sacrifice of dismemberment.

The journalist Alpana Kishore argues that without Partition, India would have gone on wrestling with an unresolved demand for a Muslim nation-state. It would have been haunted by the spectre of partition and the very different vision of national development embraced by Pakistans founders. (Zakaria).

This recalls BR Ambedkars views on Pakistan. He too was an anti-colonial thinker who was simultaneously critical of the nation-state. Yet, he saw Partition as unavoidable once the demand had been raised (and given his own notions of Muslim difference). To refuse it would simply endanger the new republic with the constant threat of civil war. (Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 1941; Pakistan, or Partition of India, 1944; Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy.) Arguably, in the end, Partition has haunted India anyway.

But besides these rationalist-idealist visions of a postcolonial Pakistan and India, other utopic visions were also available, for a time. Some saw an equally post-nationalist utopic prospect in the challenge of unifying a subcontinent that, they acknowledged, was divided. The poet Mohammad Ali Jauhar emerged as a leader of the Khilafat movement.

As president of the Congress party in 1923, he said:

I had long been convinced that here in this country of hundreds of millions of human beings, intensely attached to religion, and yet infinitely split up into communities, sects and denominations, providence had created for us the mission of solving a unique problem and working out a new synthesis, which was nothing low than a federation of faiths For more than twenty years I have dreamed the dream of a federation, grander, nobler and infinitely more spiritual than the United States of America, and today when many a political Cassandra prophesies a return to the bad old days of Hindu-Muslim dissensions I still dream that old dream of United Faiths of India.

Like Mohani and Bismil, he became disillusioned with Congress and Gandhis leadership in the early 1920s. He attended the First Round Table Conference in London in 1930-31 (Gandhi attended the one later in 1931, visiting the Thompsons while there). He died in England and was buried in Jerusalem, at his own request. Would he have remained in India or moved to Pakistan in 1947? Or later? Or would his survival have made his utopic dream a more viable possibility?

Others perceived a different utopia: the idea of an India that possessed an inherent unity even in its diversity, that was a single nation, which Partition violated. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the senior party of Indian ulema, saw imperialism as the disrupter of religiously plural societies that had their own integrity. Iqbal argued that it severed ethnically distinct Muslims who might otherwise have been united around their shared religion. (Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony; Metcalf.)

Much Indian historical writing is in this vein and has found it difficult to escape the obligation to demonstrate that oneness. This is partly because, apart from the Ambedkar approach, it was difficult for Indians to read Partition as anything but loss. Pakistanis, however nostalgic, could at least pin hope on the strength of having created something new.

To some Pakistanis, India is a dreamlike homeland, an origin story more than a land from which they are exiled. (Zakaria). Still, many survivors of Partition on both sides recall untroubled pre-Partition times marked by inter-communal harmony.

At times for elites from cosmopolitan settings, nostalgia for the Raj is part of this mix. At times joint resistance to it. At times the Unionist Partys popularity under Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, a close associate of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, in the 1930s is recalled as proof of the existence of a culturally and politically unified Punjab betrayed by higher politicians (at other times its social conservatism and loyalty to the Raj recalled as liabilities), even though the pressure of maintaining that unity against the competing forces of the League, Congress and the British was probably what killed Sikander Hyat Khan in December 1946.

We have no way of gauging the accuracy of memories untroubled pre-Partition harmony, but as Anam Zakaria and other collectors of oral histories note, memory and how people choose to remember certain events is as important as historical facts themselves. (Zakaria). Indeed, some memories were shaped by dismay at the violent change Partition wrought. Even those who did not move witnessed the destruction of their communities and the arrival of new, tormented faces, a transformation that made some see the struggle as a waste.

At the same time that the Pakistani state whitewashes Sikh history in Punjab literally in the case of the frescoes at the entrance of the Dera Sahab complex in Lahore we hear of Pakistanis who miss Diwali and Eastern Punjabis who miss Eid. (Nadhra Khan, Lahore Revisited: The City and Its Nineteenth Century Guidebook, lecture.)

It is true that many communities have coexisted in India and that Partition included many acts of inter-communal kindness. But equally true is the fact that in the end, Congress agreed to Partition, and that, since 1947, the community has again and again been constituted through violence in India impossible facts for those committed to the notion of an eternally unified India betrayed only by Jinnah and the Muslim League. (As Pandey notes, violence did not accompany Partition; it was constitutive of it. See also Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony.)

But apart from nostalgia for a lost utopia, even after Partition, many imagined the possibility for a unique international friendship between the two nations, in which the border was in fact a bridge permitting connection and communication.

Deferrals or reversals of the decision to stay or move, indicated by late departure or ongoing maintenance of bi-national existence for business and family reasons, are perhaps most symptomatic of this outlook. They represent a willful and wishful belief in the prerogative to remain locally and privately rather than nationally embedded as long as it was practicable.

It was certainly not obvious that Partition would mean total severance of connection. And in fact, many crossed legally without much obstruction until the 1965 war. Border communities continued to engage in common celebrations of Baisakhi. Others crossed illegally between bordering villages, like Germans in the early years of the Cold War.

Zakarias collection of oral histories includes the poignant case of Muhammad Boota who repeatedly crossed from his adopted village in Pakistan into his old village in Indian Punjab to search for a Sikh girl he had loved. As in the great qissas (romantic epics like Waris Shahs), he never found her but remained devoted to her. (Zakaria; See also the story of Ghulam Ali in Zamindar, Long Partition.)

The border became more clearly demarcated and impassable after the wars of 1965 and 1971, but even then, through 1986 no line or wire demarcated the border near Kasur villages, and people crossed accidentally. (Zakaria.)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the utopic belief that borders did not change anything, even when they became impassable, that an un-severable regional unity transcends the experience and fact of Partition.

Here it is crucial to remember that the Indian and Pakistani dream for nation-statehood was fulfilled in a moment in which the entire system of nation-states was in severe crisis, with displaced minorities emerging in West Asia and Europe. (Mufti notes that nationalism has historically been a great disrupter of social and cultural relations, setting forth an entire dynamic of inclusion and exclusion within the very social formation that it claims as uniquely its own and with which it declares itself identical. By rendering some part of that formation as minority, it renders that group potentially movable. Thus, it has historically been a force for violent displacement. Enlightenment in the Colony.) This context shaped calls to rise above both nationalism and borders.

Maulana Azad (who tried his hand at poetry too in his younger days) insisted even after Partition on the existence of a composite culture, shared among all and possessing secular and cosmopolitan dimensions. He was a nationalist, in the sense of believing in the reality of an Indian nation that could stand independently of British rule, but also grasped the dangers nationalism produced for minorities.

His solution was to refuse politics based on fear to refuse to fear for the fate of a Muslim minority in independent India and to refuse the very notion of a Muslim minority. This leap of faith marks the secularism of Azads public life, explains Aamir Mufti. He articulated this complex vision in a speech in October 1947 in Jama Masjid in Delhi, which persuaded many Muslims there to stay, just when nationalism was violently reorganising the region into new nation-states.

Those who articulated such visions at once perceived their vulnerability, their increasingly outdated utopian nature. They knew that refusing nationalisms disruption of pluralism was its own kind of madness, reminiscent of Bishan Singhs stubborn attachment to the no mans land of Saadat Hasan Mantos Toba Tek Singh.

But while Mantos story encapsulated that madness in a dark, Chekhovian manner, such madness found a different kind of sanction in the Urdu poetic tradition, where it seemed less the breakdown of reason than the typically hopeless (but no longer melancholic or politically passive) idealism of the poetic subject, the lover.

They were the farzaane (learned, wise men) who double as deewane (mad, inspired men) in Jagannath Azads ghazal titled, 15 August 1947: Na puchho jab bahar aayi to deewanon pe kya guzari/ Zara dekho ki is mausam mein farzaanon pe kya guzari (Dont ask what befell the mad (the lovers) when spring came/ Just look at what befell the wise in this season).

With the plural deewane, the sher [verse] embraces the world of Azads fellow poets, his friends, as the losers of this history. And indeed the friendship among poets was one critical way in which the border was rendered meaningless, at least for some, especially those who chose to see it as a temporary inconvenience on the way to a future goal that they knew would transcend all borders.

While Faiz continued his political and poetic pursuits in Pakistan, his friend Makhdoom Mohiuddin of Hyderabad pursued poetry, lyric-writing for the film industry, labour activism, Communist Party of India leadership, trades union activism and activities with the Progressive Writers Association and Indian Peoples Theatre Association and was a primary leader of the Telangana Rebellion from 1946-50, the rebellion of peasants against Telangana landlords and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

He also inaugurated the short-lived Paritala Republic. Jailed in 1951 like Faiz in Pakistan he wrote the poem, Qaid (Imprisonment). On his release, he fought elections and joined Parliament, participating in the national political process as a member of the Communist Party of India.

For these poet-activists, Partition was a tragic yet transient event in a long struggle for far more radical ends. It was inconclusive. And their agreement on that across the border, their continued solidarity, was a mutual affirmation.

When Makhdoom died in 1969, Faiz composed a poetic homage adapting his friends celebrated ghazal, Aap ki yaad aati rahi raat bhar. [Your memory came to me all the night long.] Both versions can be read on multiple levels, as all ghazals, but let me offer a suggestive reading of the maqta (last verse) in each.

Makhdooms ended, Koi deewaana galiyon mein phirta raha/ Koi awaaz aati rahi raat bhar. [Some madman (lover) wandered in the streets/ Some sound came all the night long], evoking the eternal beckoning of some ideal in the darkness, towards which the poet-as-agent-of-history fumbles, perhaps never reaching it.

It is at once near yet out of reach. Faizs version ended, Ek umeed se dil behelta raha/ Ek tamanna sataati rahi raat bhar. [The heart amused itself with a hope/ A wish tormented (me) all the night long], evoking the desire for communion with a friend who is now impossibly far, in classic Sufi fashion, but also perhaps a memory of their shared, incomplete pursuit: the soothingly idealistic hope for a more humane future that is simultaneously agitating, despite our knowledge that it is ideal and thus unachievable.

For those entangled in this border-transgressing literary and political community, Partition was not a stopping ground. It could not be allowed to become a stopping ground. As Faiz wrote, reflecting on 1947 in 1951, Chale chalo ki woh manzil abhi nahi aayi. [Let us keep going, for that destination has not yet come].

To be sure, the notion of a long, joint journey ahead, despite borders, was also a mechanism for coping with the actual trauma of Partition, which Faiz genuinely felt. He considered it too big to cope with in poetry apart from his attempt in that 1951 poem, Subah-e-Azadi (Freedoms Dawn) although in allusive ways he did in other works too, I believe. (Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress. Faiz did not think he wrote about Partition beyond this 1951 poem.)

One might reasonably interpret this indifference to borders as a form of denial, as fantasy. Arguably works like Toba Tek Singh engaged in precisely such fantasy, as literary form, whatever Mantos commitments to social realism.

Fantasy is a departure from consensus reality, in the words of one literary scholar (Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, quoted in Karline McLain, The Fantastic as Frontier: Realism, the Fantastic, and Transgression in Mid-Twentieth Century Urdu Fiction, Annual of Urdu Studies 16), and belief in the immateriality of the border was a departure from the consensus reality of Pakistani and Indian nation-statehood. More than fantasy, however, it was romance, as articulated clearly in Faiz and Makhdooms couplets above. The unattainable end utopia itself was a reworking of birha in its own way, as was the experience of Partition itself.

Poets aloofness from Partition helps explain why post-Partition Urdu poetry continued to invoke extra-national geography: the Leftist Pakistani poet Ibn-e-Insha (born in Jalandhar in 1927), composed Tu Kahan Chali Gayi Thi (Where Had You Gone) in the 1950s, gesturing with equal ease towards Karachi and Delhi.

Nazir Qaisers poetry is as ecumenical in its geography. Shiv Kumar Batalvi (often referred to as Punjabs Byron) drew on the ancient epic about Puran Bhagat of Sialkot for his epic verse play, Loona in 1965. Jagannath Azad came to India, but his poetry dwelled on memories of his homeland, his lost chaman (garden).

While in Pakistan on his first post-Partition visit in 1948, he wrote the celebrated couplet, Main apne ghar mein aaya hoon magar andaaz to dekho/ Ke apne aap ko manind-e-mehman leke aaya hoon [I have come into my own home, but look in what manner/ For I have brought myself like a guest].

It remained his home. Alienated as he was, he was still not a guest but guest-like. He was split into both host and guest, at once at home and not at home, desi and pardesi.

Pakistani poets also continued to reach for the non-Islamic but (idols) and puja (worship, implying idol worship) on which the ironic idiom of Urdu poetry depends, despite the vanishing, ghostlike presence of such things in their midst.

Indeed, in a sense, the entire Indo-Islamic poetic tradition presumes a world of Muslims coexisting with non-Muslims to dramatise the ironies of worldly and unworldly faith at its core. (Sikh identity markers similarly presume a mixed social context. Else why the need for distinguishing markers?) This literary transcendence of Partition mirrored socio-cultural continuities such as the celebrations of Indian festivals among Pakistanis near the border. (Riyaz Wani, interview with Anam Zakaria.)

As Zakaria notes, even those who left out of conviction felt a bond with the home they abandoned because of ongoing relationships and memories: There is no clear line for these people. It is difficult to decipher what they love more, where they belong more. This confusion is the only truth for them. (Zakaria.)

If the goal was a coherent national self, the result was a population of divided selves. The exile, the refugee, the orphaned, the converted, the abducted-and-reclaimed all these survivors were in different ways split in many cases violently split, even shredded selves.

Permit me a metaphor from physics: In quantum theory, the uncertain, non-deterministic, smeared nature of electrons helps explain the stability of atoms; similarly, the stability of South Asian identity depends on a kind of indeterminacy.

Punjabis in particular seem smeared through space. Nations are like the impossibly rigid atomic structures of classical mechanics. They cannot contain such uncertainty: Makhdoom and Faiz were both literally in captivity in independent India and Pakistan in 1951.

Gyanendra Pandey calls on historians to explore the meaning of Partition in terms of what it produced the social arrangements, forms of consciousness, subjectivities it created rather than focusing obsessively on causes, a focus betraying Indian historians commitments to particular utopic visions of India. (Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

Curiously, as Rakhshanda Jalil notes, Urdu poets focus more on the consequences of Partition than its causes. (Jalil.) To me, their preoccupation with effects reveals their sense of the epiphenomenal and possibly transient nature of Partition their preoccupation with other utopias, unfinished business that Partition traumatically disrupted. Pandey might find in poetry if not historical writing the earliest analysis of what Partition did to subjectivity and consciousness quite apart from the human destruction it unleashed.

Here again, we find intriguing intersections with shifting subjectivities in Europe. Enlightenment notions of a coherent, rational self had long since smothered notions of an internally split self among Europeans.

Early versions of Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments had described a divided or doubled self which became more metaphorical and less literal in later versions, once the notion of an individuated, internally coherent modern self took hold in the late 18th century. (See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England.)

The turn of the twentieth century saw new testing of this concept, most conspicuously in metropolitan occultist circles who experimented with the relationship of self to other, albeit now locating the split internally, in the psychology and neurobiology of the individual, rather than in the operation of social claims on the individual.

Theosophists were part of this cultural world, most notably Annie Besant, whose journey from turn-of-the-century British socialism (she famously led the matchgirl strike in London in 1888) to a prominent leader in the Indian nationalist movement was inseparable from her explorations of spirituality and selfhood. (Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.)

She too was mixed up in the world of poet-activists, joining the poet Sarojini Naidu in representing in London the case for Indian women to vote. (Naidu was a Bengali from Hyderabad who joined the national movement after the 1905 partition of Bengal and became the second woman to preside over Congress after Besant. She was governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1947-49 when Urdu poets there deliberated staying or going.)

Now, the subject of Urdu poetry had long been understood as split. This was what Sufi longing for the union was about. Momins much-loved couplet is exemplary: Tum mere paas hote ho goya/ jab koi doosra nahin hota [You are with me thus/ as when no second person is there].

In true mystic union, the self becomes extinct. This idiom seems ready-made to address the post-Partition condition of a partial, parted, or divided self. Urdu as a poetic language figured critically in the articulation of this subjectivity. As Mufti shows in his beautiful analysis of Faizs poetry, Indianness has come to encompass the disavowal of Indianness (like the electron that both is and is not).

Mufti cites, paradigmatically, Faizs Marsia (Elegy) from a 1971 collection: Dur ja kar qarib ho jitney/ ham se kab qarib the itne/ Ab na aoge tum na jaoge/ vasl o hijran baham hue kitne. [The extent to which you are close now that you have gone far/ when were you ever so close to me/ Now you will neither come nor go/ how as one union and separation have become].

In this four-line poem, Mufti perceives a dialectic of self and other in which the subject and object of desire do not so much become one but simultaneously come near and become distant and are rendered uncertain. It recalls Zakarias story of a man in a Pakistani village who daily sees his old village across the border it is at once near and far. (Zakaria. A similar phenomenon transpires on the German border towns Edith Sheffer describes in Burned Bridge.)

This is the reality of modern Punjabi subjectivity: contradictory, tense, antagonistic. Faizs grasp of this dialectically produced self clearly resonated; his work has remained phenomenally popular across the region. As Mufti explains, he articulated an Indian experience of the self that took division seriously and yet transcended borders and communal and national divides, much as he tried to do in his own literary and political commitments.

After all, he worked within an idiom in which indefinite separation from the beloved was the only ground from which to contemplate union. He subversively renders the abandoned home as the beloved, rather than a heathen land virtuously abandoned inverting the religious interpretation of Partition as hijrat (in the sense of the Holy Prophets flight from Mecca to Medina).

Urdu could uniquely convey the reality of this split self, nurtured in Pakistan where it was cut off from its homelands in Delhi, the Deccan and Uttar Pradesh, where Urdus status simultaneously declined.

Poets worldly experience of exile and refuge gave hijr (separation, departure) a range of new, secular connotations, notes Mufti. (Mufti). Faizs agonistic embrace of that inheritance is a South Asian expression of modernity, at once reminding us of the worldly basis of religious experience itself what early Punjabi romances expressed as allegory, or, in the language of the Punjabi tappa (folk lyric): Milna taan rab nu hai, tera pyaar bahaana hai [It is with god that I seek to unite, your love is merely the pretext]. For long, poets have grasped the instrumental nature of the worldly experience for the sake of higher spiritual experience.

The persistence of that mystical idiom, and the love successive generations profess for it, reveals the continued intimacy of the secular, modern self with its religious inheritance. In this too, modern South Asian subjectivity senses its incompleteness, its exilic existence. (On this see also Mufti. This is not a uniquely South Asian quality, of course. See for instance, Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.)

In short, we cannot think of post-Partition identity only in the terms of the normalised vocabulary of the new nation-states, presuming autonomous national selves based on the European template. Progressive Writers attached to such requirements of normality were the kind who, Mufti speculates, suddenly turned against Manto, whose work and affect fell beyond that pale. (Mufti. Manto was disowned by the Pakistani Marxist-leaning literary set. Charged with obscenity, he avoided his sentence of prison with hard labour on appeal.)

The possibility of transcending national identity within oneself is powerful. For EP Thompson (in Scotts luminous interpretation, again), poetrys role was to leaven politics with imagination, to suggest a middle ground betweendisenchantment with perfectionist illusions and complete apostasy. That ground is the demanding, yet a creative place of continuing aspiration. (Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.)

The work of continuing aspiration is the work of Azads deewane. The split South Asian self is the middle ground poets gave us between disenchantment and apostasy. It is Becketts, I cant go on, Ill go on and Gramscis mantra-like, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

The New Left that Thompson helped form in England after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 attracted the Communist, atheist and anti-imperialist Pakistani Tariq Ali, the grandson of Sikandar Hayat Khan and an important interlocutor of Edward Said, another deep thinker about exile and anti-colonialism who met Faiz in Beirut.

Alis anti-imperialist critiques were as globally sweeping as Faizs poetry about Chile, Palestine, Namibia and the Rosenbergs. Talal Asad, son of Muhammad Asad, has emerged as a major thinker about religion and secularism. The chain of inheritance and restless, continuing aspiration is long.

Thompson came to India for the first time in 1976, after our poets alternative visions had long expired. He was warmly welcomed by Indira Gandhi and her government in acknowledgement of the friendship between their fathers. But it was the time of Indiras Emergency.

He was horrified by the governments repression of dissent and by the Communist Party of Indias support of it and noted the strange convergence of Western modernising theory with orthodox Moscow-directed socialist theory: Both imagined a modern urban intellectual elite with know-how imposing modernity and progress upon the nation.

Both prioritised top-down, capital-intensive technologically-driven developments depending on a disciplined workforce for national economic take-off. Through a vulgar (ie un-poetic) economic determinism, Marxism echoed utilitarian and positivist ideas. (Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics; Hamiltons 2007 talk at the History Department of the University of Auckland.) Politics without poetry is lifeless, and poetry without politics tends to the self-indulgent.

It is the same in Pakistan: I was fortunate enough to meet Jazib Qureshi in 2016 (2021 note: he has sadly just passed away), through the genius of the Bay Areas Urdu Academy, and he commented on the absence of poets of real standing in todays Pakistan, no one to fill the shoes of Josh or Iqbal.

If modern Urdu poetry evolved as critique of empire and nation it is no surprise that as the Left has crumbled so has poetrys most powerfully transcendent function. Modis India is bent on suffocating the Left further.

Indias poets are returning their national awards in the face of the governments thuggish attacks on dissent of all kinds, rediscovering their role in history and outside exclusionist mainstream nationalism. (See David Barstow and Suhasini Raj, Indian Writers Spurn Awards as Violence Flares, New York Times.) As we continue to look to technology to save us, despite the unending disasters that pile up before our eyes, it is time perhaps to revisit and reinvent the possibility and promise of poetic action.

Poetry is a social and collective endeavour. The writer alone cannot make poetry or poetic action. In Urdu poetry, the reader identifies entirely with the first-person voice of the poet. The poets place in history becomes the readers too.

This possibility for such total identification, for a kind of subsumption in the poet, is astonishingly universal. I identify with the Hum (collective and first-person subject) of Faizs poetry, even though (on the face of it) I am a woman, a Hindu and an Indian Punjabi (where he was a man, a Muslim and a Pakistani Punjabi).

Urdu poetry is queer in this sense: a space of non-normative identity and politics. And yet, it could not attend to the plight of Heer. When Jagannath Azad was leaving Pakistan after a visit to return to India, Muhammad Tufail, editor of the Pakistani Progressive literary journal Nuqush, took sweets to him at the station, quipping, Tumhein to yun rukhsat karte hain jaise beti ko rukhsat kiya jaata hai [You were send away in the way one sends off a daughter]. (I thank Hamida Chopra for sharing this story.)

Instead of separation from a beloved of unspecified gender, he rendered Azads exile from his homeland in the more clearly gendered form of the daughter leaving her parents home to join her new family after marriage a rite common to Hindu, Sikh and Muslim weddings in the region.

Playing on the land-as-mother trope, the departure becomes forward-looking, a rite of passage to adulthood progress itself. It is more final than the beloveds separation, but also less rigid, in that a girl can and does go back to her old home at times, albeit to be indulged as a guest with few substantive entitlements. But Tufails line also reminds us that, however vaguely gendered the poetic terms in which Faiz and others wrote about it, Partitions violence was deeply gendered.

Amrita Pritams plea to Waris Shah and Mantos stories, like Khol Do (Open It) acknowledged that reality. So too has scholarly work on Partition by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das and others. They diagnose the complicity of the two new states in appropriating the violence that was done to women within an ideology of community and nation.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (born in 1936) may have been activated by such themes in his recuperation of womens agency and sexuality in Loona, his celebrated retelling of the ancient epic of Puran Bhagat in 1965. Stylistically, he was influenced by the qissas as well as European epic poetry. The legend goes that the Sialkot prince Puran Bhagat spurned the advances of his young stepmother, Loona, a sinfully lustful seductress, who wreaked violent revenge: his arms and legs were amputated and he wound up exiled from his home, becoming an ascetic who later forgave and blessed his punishers.

But Batalvi tells the story from Loonas point of view: the disgust of this lower-caste young girl from Chamba at being married to an old king against her wishes, her entirely reasonable desire to be with a man her own age, Purans rejection of her out of suspicion of the merely sexual rather than spiritual nature of her attraction, and her self-sacrificial revenge.

For, her destruction of Puran is her own too. She knows she will live in infamy for it, but hopes that her infamy might prevent society from producing forcing future Loonas to marry against their will. Having borne the blame for Purans death for centuries, Loona finally finds peace in Batalvis play. Known for his passionate expression of the agony of separated lovers, here Batalvi redeems worldly love and the rebellion of youth. (For more on Loona, see Sa Soza, Shiv Kumar Batalvi.)

Here the punishing violence of Partition is visited on a male body, with Purans dismemberment and exile. In blaming society rather than Loona for this tragic outcome, Batalvi at once exonerates the individual perpetrator of violence (whatever her gender) while validating all Punjabi womens need and desire for such revenge.

He renders the Punjabi subject of history as female. Notably, he published this earthily Punjabi work on the eve of the repartitioning of Indian Punjab on linguistic lines, when other Punjabi Hindus claimed Hindi rather than Punjabi as their mother tongue, a choice made possible by the longstanding elision of Hindi with Urdu.

Loona was the Patakha Guddi (Firecracker Kite) of her time (a song penned by the poet Irshad Kamil, a Muslim from Malerkotla in Indian Punjab and sung by Jyoti and Sultana Nooran (Punjabi Muslims from Jalandhar). (Composed by AR Rahman for Imitiaz Alis film Highway.) She is the poet of her own destiny. She lives her contradiction as a means of superseding loss, a way of living as if in exile even when at home, as Maulana Azad felt he did, given his particular background and education and relationship to Muslim and nationalist politics in his time. (On Azad, see Mufti. Certainly, it is also a luxury of class.)

Modern Urdu writing, having displaced the relationship of language and self to place as Mufti tells us, is a vehicle for exilic thinking, an awareness, wherever one happens to be, that modern history has been one of marginalisation and uprooting on a massive scale, that split selfhoods are typical, in South Asia, but also in Germany, the Balkans, Cyprus, Palestine/Israel, Ireland and elsewhere. (Mufti.)

What is the poets role in history? Of course, the question is romantic.

Byron was romantic, Thompson was romantic, Faiz was romantic, Punjabis are romantic, land is romantic. And romanticism has its dangers: the British were romantic, Nehru was romantic, Silicon Valley is a romance. Dams and drones are romantic.

The Hindu Right and the Islamic Right offer romances of their own. There is a marketplace of romance, but the romance of the Left has too long been out of stock. Bollywood cannot do it alone, and it too, after all, is bound up in the worship of profit, god and nation.

Part one of this essay: Priya Satia: Why poetry remains a primary resource in remembering and understanding the Partition.

More here:

How the Partition contributed to the queerness of Urdu poetry to make it non-normative - Scroll.in

The immersive narrative art installation called Nove Ita opens this weekend.

Denver loves its immersive art. Weve got not one, but two immersive Van Gogh experiences, Prismajics popular Shiki Dreams installation, whats soon to be the countrys biggest Meow Wolf installation yet, and countless other pop-up immersive art experiences.

While youre waiting for Meow Wolf to open, check out Novo Ita, a new augmented-reality art experience that combines immersive, narrative, psychedelic elements and is created entirely out of recycled and reclaimed materials.

Brought to Denver by the team behind Spookadelia, Meow Wolf Denver artist Douglas A. Schenck and a team of more than 35 artists, writers, performers and tech professionals, Nova Ita takes guests into a magical, botanical utopia where humans and nature live in harmony. Guests can engage with augmented reality spirit guides and wander from installation to installation, where theyll interact with botanic art, lights and sound to uncover a narrative and learn more about this strange world.

Nova Ita challenges visitors to take a world-centered view that recognizes the relationships that exist among all living systems & the many ways these systems are consistently moving toward harmony and balance, according to press materials. It is a movement towards a novo ita which roughly translates from Latin to new we or new us.

The experience runs through August 29 out of Spectras gallery on South Broadway. You can buy tickets now.

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Spectra Art Space opens immersive art installation, Nova Ita, in Denver this summer - Denverite