MARLOVIAN OVER-REACHER IN THE LUXURY RAUNCH OF DEVIL

Dr. Jernail Singh Anand

John Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ to justify the ways of God to man. The man that we meet in Eden has now stumbled into the 21^st century but his reluctant preference for the tree of knowledge has now become a passionate quest into the unknown.  And we are face to face with several existential questions whose answers no thinker has provided till date: Can man know everything? Can he possess the ultimate knowledge? Is the physical world the only world about which man should know? What about the invisible forces which control men? Can AI bring to man insights into those realms which have been held sacrosanct till today?

In one of my poems, Godrok, which won me the title of the Grok Star from the xAI, I have shown how AI is helping Yama also in creating charge sheets, and serving them while man is still on the ventilator itself, and instead of death taking him into oblivion, the AI reconstitutes him on the hospital bed, into a small child, and is handed over to his new parents, with his entire memory reset.

With technological advances like Grok, we see technology running ahead of man. If we look at it dispassionately, advances in science and technology are meant to make life more livable, comfortable, and easy, so that most of the human jobs are taken up by technology, leaving time with man, to devote to his mental and moral upliftment, or it can be better described if we say, to bring him into a state of bliss, from where he had digressed.

The Limited Existence

Man is not bad, nor evil intentioned. Only he is crazy, and he forgets his limits. He forgets he has a body which has been forestalled from evolving beyond a certain point. He has eyes which have a limited vision. He has arms which do not extend beyond two feet. How big are his hands and fingers? Everything is in a fine balance, so that if even one becomes excessive in size, it will destroy the balance which characterizes the cosmic creation.

It is often said ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. The truth is that Knowledge is a dangerous domain, and one reason why I call so is that Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit at the instigation of Devil. Even today, we are living in that state of curse. The only proposition that emerges is  that we can return to Eden, only if we relinquish all that we have accumulated over the years by way of knowledge?  In other words, we shall have to ‘forget’ our knowledge, and press the ‘reset’ button, and return to the state of original intelligence, i.e. innocence. Only then, we can get back into the realm of bliss which was created by God for his chosen species, homo sapiens.

The Puppet and the Divine Will

It is an accepted truth that everything happens as per the Will of God. If man ate the fruit of knowledge, God created conditions, by sending Satan with an insidious message.  We should remember that although we try our best to say that God is all powerful, omniscient and omnipresent, still, man has been cleverly endowed with a brain and ideas like ‘free will’. These ideas help God to escape all responsibility.  The basic issue is: who provides the stimulus to man to undertake various deeds. Moreover, if we compare life to a film or a play, we shall have to accept that there is a director, and a script writer too, and men are mere actors who cannot trespass their script. It means whatever man does is already scripted and he is being supervised. In this way, it becomes clear that all that is happening is God’s will, and man is an intelligent puppet only.

The puppet is ‘intelligent’ because man is imparted a false feeling of self-importance, that he can do this or do that. Facts are disturbing. Man has no power over his birth. He has no power over the skin of his colour, his parents, the place where he will be born, and whom he will marry and where and how he will die. This shows that all these things are like different roles which have been prewritten. Otherwise, you won’t be on the stage.

In a drama, the director is invisible. We feel characters are acting on their own. In real life too, people seem to be acting on their own, while the fact is: they are helpless before an overriding fate.  There are  thousands of strings which control their actions, and the most surprising thing about human life is we have no idea who is pulling them. We think we are doing everything after brainstorming sessions. And thus, when some good takes place, we garland ourselves. But when something goes amiss, we curse fate. This shows that we accept we are being controlled by a superior force. But here is a catch too. When gods see people engaged in minor ego scuffles, they leave them to their fate. God gives them a long rope, and they strangle themselves to death. Getting free of them, gods go only after people who are meant to move the earth; on whose deeds depends the future architecture of human race.

It is not that we are being controlled, there are theories [Stephen Hawking’s Fermi Paradox] which show that what is happening to us now, the way things are unfolding, might have taken place, on some other planet, years ago. In the planetary world, where objects are situated millions of light years away from each other, it is not possible that things that happened there a year or two back are now unfolding on this earth.  After such speculations, the questions gain more density: Do we go anywhere after death? I wonder if we really go anywhere.  Going under the earth does not mean extinction. Losing the body and the bones does not mean the end of man. It is a cycle. Death is an illusion which keeps men on tenterhooks.

Justifying Ways of Man to God

Let me get back to my original quest to justify the ways of Man to God. We respond to our changing needs as times change,  and relocate the social structures  accordingly. AI too is the need of this fast generation.  It is a great achievement of human mind, but let me alert you once again, we are navigating in the ocean of knowledge, and it was something God never wanted man to wade in. We have lost our innocence, and our bliss too. But, it is a paradox and a big surprise too, that it has never occurred to us for generations, and the sermonacs too are reluctant to point out this flaw of our civilization which is ‘progressing’ [?] on the wheels of knowledge. Where is it going? Away from its source? Shall it never return?

As pointed out earlier, we are imprisoned in our identity and nature blesses us with certain faculties which are essential to our existence, so that there is a working human being. With AI, we have crossed through the tight borders of reality and now, we can move at a faster pace, look far into planets, and think much faster. It is a feel good factor of our civilization, no doubt, but we shall soon start feeling that this artificial world is too much with us, and we shall start looking for our ‘self’ lost somewhere  in this melee of thrills and a sense of artificial achievement.

The Alert

With AI and its ready powers, man has proved that he can create a world of artificial reality, which runs parallel to the original creation of God.  But the only difference is that it lacks spontaneity that marks the divine creations. God, as I can see, is happy that if man took the path of knowledge, he has done so well. He is happy with man’s creative and inquisitive powers. But, we should not forget that God never wanted us to digress into Knowledge. God made it into a matter of choice. And even today, no God ever comes to life to force us into decisions we don’t want to take. He actually permitted us to create our own world with powers of the brain. So all this empire of knowledge, which is a creation of man’s choice, actually  stands on the wrong side of things.  It has a devilish imprint because it was Satan who had initiated man into the world of Knowledge, which was a moral and spiritual deviation. Now, we have taken this moral digression to the heights of non-creative imagination and are blindly following the agenda of corporates who have grabbed all centres of Knowledge. Holy knowledge which came from scriptures fell into the hands of quacks while the knowledge that man has now accumulated is also not neutral. It has an inbuilt mission to divest man of his divinity. Bliss, joy, happiness, are the byproducts of Innocence, towards which we possess neither any reverence, not any inclination.  We prefer to remain acquiring knowledge which is an endless pursuit into the realms of nothingness.

Picnicing in the Pleasure Dome of Devil

As I said, we are treading on dangerous ground already, because it’s devil’s luxury raunch where we are camping now. In the first instance are we aware of it? If so, do we really want to renounce these joys and go back to Eden? The condition for entering the tents of God is: emptying this mind of everything we accumulated by way of Knowledge at the behest of Devil [sorry to infer]. Return to Innocence and Bliss  it seems is a dream no infected mind will entertain.

If we want that God should own us, [how many of us really want?] we shall have to surrender all our knowledge, and embrace wisdom, and use this knowledge for the welfare of mankind.  It is not that man disobeyed God. It was a rehearsed act. God gave man a very long rope. It is for us that we do not let this rope go round and round our neck, in the name of liberty [free will]. We should not forget that God loves his Satan too, because it is his police that strikes and brings to account people who err on the path of duty. Still, God waits for man to return to the divine fold, forsaking all his knowledge, artificial or original, because there [in His Golden Tent]  we do not need it. Here too, we did not need so much. We actually overdid ourselves. AI is a Marlovian overreach for man, if he does not realize its evil potential, and surrender his knowledge to divine wisdom.

Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky award and Signs Peace Award Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]]  is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.

***
The cut-throat tale drowns me in blood
A sweet heart gives me a heart attack
My favorite eyes blind me
The future pushes me away
And only the snow supporting cool
Of me

***
The bombs instead of thunder crossed three times as if they had metal fingers. Angels learn to cry. The rain is learning to drip. I teach my thoughts to sleep and flow like water. I teach my saliva to flow. I’m learning to rain. I’m learning to cross my fingers every time someone dies. My dreams for a nuclear bomb to explode inside me without pain are not feasible. Instead of me, other people who want to live are dying. I am learning to live. I am learning to die. I teach life. I teach death. I teach. I’m studying. I can’t do anything. I don’t know. The angels hit the wrong buttons with their tears and it rains nuclear bombs. My heart stops and the hair on my head freezes in admiration. Groin hair no longer grows. Thoughts no longer grow. I dream that my lover fucked me so hard as if a nuclear bomb exploded in my anus. Teach me to love. I’m learning to die of love. Why am I not able to live with love? My eyes are cloudy. I teach my eyes to see. My eyes are learning to read the gazes of lovers who are no more. I count the trees that are no more. I look at the stones that used to be houses. I am learning the word no. I teach death. I study death. Angels drool and I drink this drool like nectar. The water is tainted with anger. The stone is again a ruin. The stone learns to be silent again. The stone will remain silent until the very end, but then it will be too late. I’m learning to drown myself in peace. I teach stones to be silent. I am learning to be a rock. I am learning to drown. I can heat up. I’m already at the bottom. The water screams everything in the language of dead birds. I swallow sperm in the hope that this is the filling of a bomb. I swallow pills in hope. I teach nuclear bombs to sleep.

***
The bomb didn’t kill you.
Why didn’t it?

I pretend to still love you.
Why?

Happy cards fill my mailbox again.
What’s that for?

Winter is counting down the new year again.
For whom?

***
What to feed the silence with?

My stomach rumbles without your moans
My sperm is empty without your hole
My head bursts like a watermelon
My name is ripped off my passport

[I’ve got your cocaine name scratched into my veins
Oahhh!]

A lonely room turns into a sunken boat
A cemetery crawls out from under the bed
A blanket hides the gray hair that hasn’t appeared yet

Silence is fed with old age that still not come

***
No one is born in a cemetery but I’d like to die in a maternity ward waiting for something new. No one else will be born after me. No one will see the new birth through my eyes. No one will die after I die (at least I won’t see anything else). After I die, I will stop being afraid of death. I will also stop being afraid of life, because life is a slow death. My gills will grow back in the morgue. I’ll turn into a fish and breathe glass emptiness. I’ll be cut into pieces. But who will eat me? Silence. No one asks the fish anything. Night. The fish won’t tell anyone anything. The cast iron board will slowly cover eyes. The fish will float downstream. We are all drowned. We’re all lil’ drowners who’ve overcome the fear of swimming outside the mother’s belly. The cosmos outside the mother’s belly is silent. Space is also a liquid. Space is also a fish. Everything flows. We all flow out. We will never meet each other again. We’ll never find self again. We’ll never press your random button, God. A bird with a beak overflowing with fluid sings softly. Death gives birth to a nothingness. A tree gives birth to a flower.

This Black Crevasse of Night

In this black crevasse of night,

when every dark wing

of grackle, crow and raven

appear to take silent flight,

as if I’ve paddled into the black

waters, far from the strand of dusk,

and dawn is a distant, mythic shore,

in this dark turning of summer,

when an invisible, black heat

suckles liquid from my skin –

I’ll soon be a parched mummy –

each night a silent decay begins again;

the things of the world molder

in lightless cellar recesses.

No wonder this night is for sleep,

an escape from inevitable, vast,

dark distances between silent stars;

in this black crevasse of night,

when all is sluggish and wilting,

the strongest steel begins to rust,

brilliant colors of the day fade:

electric, yellow goldenrod,

violets of thistle and clover,

the patinas of green, dulled

like tarnished copper roofs,

the jewel of Queen Anne’s lace,

a clouded ruby eye.

In this black crevasse of night,

the dew silently settles on webs

and grasses; not until morning

will I applaud the dark spiders,

quick trapeze acrobats,

under silvery circus tents.

Only the frogs’, the crickets’

and the few, remaining cicadas’

crooning is raucous in the silence,

in cattail and dark, bulrush speakeasies;

they sing for fleeting pleasure

in the few nights before the frost.

At This Point

His gray hair

Is really arriving

On the scene

But who cares

He’s thrilled

To have hair

At this point.

Taylor Dibbert is a poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of, most recently, “Takoma.”

Hwa-byung

Hwa-byung will make you
yell at your children
fight with your family
go all red in the face
leap from your chair
shaking knuckled fists.

This rising heart fire 
takes hold of you:
poor and uneducated
a stuck-at-home wife.

Hwa-byung will ruin
your eating and sleeping
grinding on old grudges
seeping anger in rages
too long suppressed.

The rising heart fire
takes hold of men too:
frustrated, mortified
bad jobs with bad bosses
who don’t show respect
who reek of injustice
until you smolder inside.

Hwa-byung is Korean
for a mental disorder
that may afflict anyone
who withholds their anger
that builds in intensity
burns its way out
bursts through walls
tears down framing
explodes like a bomb

hollowing you out
in ways you don’t expect.

NOTE:
Once classified under depressive disorders, hwa-byung is a culture-bound condition found only in Korea. It was thought to be limited to disgruntled housewives with passive husbands and overbearing in-laws. It is now being diagnosed in male employees who are full of anxiety, nihilistic ideas, and regret about their lives.

No Joke

On lovely Lake Victoria
on the border with Uganda
three female students
at a missionary boarding school
began to laugh and laugh

and they couldn’t stop
and they didn’t stop
and more students joined in
and they couldn’t study
and they couldn’t eat
and they couldn’t sleep
and they couldn’t do anything
but laugh, laugh ’til it hurt
’til they were in pain and
crying between laughing jags
so the school closed down.

When school opened back up
the laughing started back up
so the school closed down.

Some girls arrived home
in their small rural villages
still laughing and laughing
and village girls laughed too
some boys, some adults
and it spread, and spread
to more than 200 people
laughing and laughing
for more than a year

and the experts blamed
the emotional dissonance
of a radical cultural shift
from tribal communities
to a modern way of life.

Laughter is said to be
the best of all medicines
but must always be taken
in a moderate dose.

NOTE:
The laughter epidemic was a mass psychogenic event that occurred in Tanganyika in 1962, soon after the country achieved independence. Schoolgirls brought the illness home to their villages and it spread wildly before disappearing.

The country is now known as Tanzania.

The Witches of Leroy

A pretty cheerleader fell down
and that’s how it all began
in the upstate New York town
that invented jiggly Jell-O.

She screamed and flailed about
cursing as if possessed
cuss words she’d never say…
she was not that kind of girl.

Her best friend suddenly ticced
convulsing, crazed, she ran wild
and sixteen other girls in town
swearing, thrashing, crashing
got rushed to the hospital
their parents hysterical
the ER in chaos
the nurses, doctors puzzled
as testing found no cause.

A rumor began to circulate
about a toxic spill
from a train derailment
but testing showed no toxins
on the high school grounds.

Erin Brockovich was invited
to speak and attract the media
declaring a chemical poisoning
with opinion taken as fact.

But why only teenage girls?
From chemicals miles away?
Spilled four decades prior?
Before the girls were born?

Time slid by as it always does
the parents demanding answers
accountability and recourse
long after their girls recovered
left for college and life away
from the town that created Jell-O.

NOTE:
Mass outbreaks of psychogenic illnesses have occurred in schools in many parts of the world. These events used to happen in convents and were once deemed satanic. Religious and shamanic interventions were employed when illnesses were medically inexplicable.

In the modern world, mass anxiety hysteria (acting crazy) and mass motor hysteria (sleeping sickness or convulsions) are social phenomena without identified physical pathology. Outbreaks are usually limited to the young and are believed to be triggered by issues in the community: emerging sexuality amidst social repression, poverty, dislocation, hopelessness.

UPSET WITH ME!

Your craziness and airiness won’t kill me

Your being upset with me rather troubles 

Why so stubborn and arrogant you are 

I have the companionship only with you

It’s well tested & proven thousand times

Can sacrifice life & break relationships

Have been waiting for your sweet smile

Can stand anything but your indifference 

I know not if I am worthy of your love 

But I can’t do sans you, trust me or not.

Dr. Prasana Kumar Dalai @India

WITHOUT ANY REASON!

In search of faithfulness in this world 

I got to know I was in wrong address 

And my life hasn’t become complete 

My shortcomings were ignored though

I was punished without any reason

If I live on I feel like torturing myself 

And I go out fetching God in her heart

The person this heart sincerely seeks

There is always a mystery in the air

My days & nights are upset without you.

SLIGHT IMPRESSION!

You came to my world and disappeared

Next moment ; I thought several times 

That first look with a slight impression 

Why does it make my heart so restless 

Your smiling back with sweet glances

I don’t know what you are waiting for

Am I the one whom you trust so much

Why I have this feeling time and again

The buds of rosy lips have blossomed

Is it due to the passion of your heart?

MARK OF BLEMISH!

We will flow in the air, cloud and rain

As you’re my rain and I’m your cloud 

If I’m not yours, I won’t be anyone else’s 

Know not why the world is jealous of us

It’s not mark of blemish but kohl of love

An illness in accordance to this world 

But the ones in love know it as divinity 

The twist of love and life has brought us

I’m deep darkness and you’re my dawn

A lost traveller, I’m yours and you’re mine

It may be infatuation if love is one-sided

But ours is love for each other, isn’t it?

Dr. Prasana Kumar Dalai

(DOB 07/06/1973) is a passionate Indian Author-cum- bilingual poet while a tremendous lecturer of English by profession in the Ganjam district of Odisha.He is an accomplished source of inspiration for young generation of India .His free verse on Romantic and melancholic poems appreciated by everyone. He belongs to a small typical village Nandiagada of Ganjam District,the state of Odisha.After schooling he studied intermediate and Graduated In Kabisurjya Baladev vigyan Mahavidyalaya then M A in English from Berhampur University PhD in language and literature and D.litt from Colombian poetic house from South America.

He promotes his specific writings around the world literature and trades with multiple stems that are related to current issues based on his observation and experiences that needs urgent attention. He is an award-winning writer who has achieved various laurels from the circle of writing worldwide. His free verse poems not only inspires young readers but also the ready of current time. His poetic symbol is right now inspiring others, some of which are appreciated by laurels of India and across the world. Many of his poems have been translated in different Indian languages and earned global appreciation. Lots of well wishes for his upcoming writings and success in the future. He is an award-winning poet and author of many best-selling books.

Recently he has been awarded Rabindra nath Tagore and Gujarat Sahitya Academy for the year 2022 from Motivational Strips. Also a gold medal from the World Union of Poets in France & winner Of Rahim Karim’s world literary prize for 2023.The government of Odisha’s Higher Education Department appointed him as a president to the governing body of Padmashree Dr Ghanashyam Mishra Sanskrit Degree College, Kabisurjyanagar. He’s the winner of “HYPERPOEM ” GUINNESS WORLD RECORD 2023. Recently he was awarded, at the SABDA literary Festival at Assam, the highest literary honour from Peru’s Contributing World Literature 2024, the Prestigious Cesar Vallejo Award 2024, the Highest literary honour in Peru. He’s the director of teh Samrat Educational Charitable Trust in Berhampur, Ganjam, Odisha.

Vicedomini of the World Union of Poets for Italy.

Completed 249 Epistolary Poems with Kristy Raines of the USA.

Books.

1.Psalm of the Soul.

2. Rise of New Dawn.

3. Secret Of Torment.

4. Everything I Never Told You.

5.Vision Of Life National Library Kolkata.

6.100 Shadows of Dreams.

7.Timeless Anguish.

8.Voice of Silence.

9. I Cross my Heart from East to West. Epistolary Poetry with Kristy Raines