Diwali - and Narnia
Oct. 19th, 2025 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenA lot going on, etc, etc. My mother's first Diwali party in the new house went marvellously well. My in-laws were here for it; lots of family friends; plus three of my friends, brown and married-into-brown. Food, patake, tikka and diya, a little bit of aarti and sweets. I got a Diwali cake from Lola's because I was so shocked and delighted that you can get commercially made Diwali cakes now, and it turned to be delicious; a kind of mango coconut confection with rose petals and pista barfi stuck to the top. So I got dressed up, everyone came, and it's so utterly fucking lovely to see A. and L. casually happy and comfortable as part of a brown family. I never get tired of it. My dad not being here made us realise that no one at the party knew how to tie a kalawa. It's supposed to be a priestly skill, and my dad came from a very traditional Brahmin family. (This was the first time I'd realised this, since his death: because I'm a Brahmin Hindu by solely patrilineal descent, I was the only one in the room. Me. The priestly skills of the Bronze Age pandits. Me.) The thing is, if my dad tied a kalawa, it never, ever, ever came off - he was a surgeon tying surgeon's knots, so the thread just stays with you until it drops off. The threads got tied anyway, without him and even though I know nothing. We're gonna have to abolish the caste system, it turns out.
Diwali isn't till tomorrow, actually! But I'm so pleased about it all.
I'm having a bit of an existential time, otherwise. Writing has been bad, it's making me feel genuinely sick and sad, and I've been worrying a lot about my Wednesdays. If I don't write on them, and I don't work on them, what do I do? Related: cluster is why I don't work in the mornings, but if cluster isn't hitting me every day, then what am I doing with my time? And that, inexorably, has been turning into - well, what am I doing with my life? I'm having trouble with that. My therapist, who is helpful sometimes, gave me advice, and then started laughing at herself for just... giving me advice, against all tenets of the therapeutic relationship. It was good advice, I think. It was - do nothing. Stop trying to get a grip on your life. Fill each Wednesday with whatever you feel like doing that day.
I'm trying it. We'll see what happens. So far it seems to have been reading a lot of children's literature, Joan Aiken, CS Lewis, Judy Blume - and I was actually going to divide this part about the books from the rest of the post, but it strikes me that "Hindu adult reads books intended for Christian children" is a pretty good segue. I'm not sure why I went to the idea of Narnia as something untaxing of the brain, but I started with The Magician's Nephew because it was my favourite as a kid, and you know, it holds up. It's my favourite because it's one of the few books I can think of that that understands grief, and does so economically, in a few words. Diggory, who I think is the most fleshed-out of Lewis's main characters - he's the only Narnia child, after all, to reach middle age - is, the narrative tells us, the only real adult in Narnia on the first day it's created, other than Aslan. The cabman and his wife who will be king and queen don't count; neither does terrible Uncle Andrew; nor does the Witch. Diggory at ten knows his mother is dying; and it's that, not magic, or magic rings, or even time, that opens him to grief, and the moral agency of adulthood. It's hard sometimes to get anything of real power out of Lewis - he's doing Christian apologetics. that's what he's doing, that's what you've gotta be signed up for - but I think this is a rare real example.
(One thing I have never understood about this book. King Frank and Queen Helen are humans, brought from our world to Narnia - and they get to stay. They are the only two humans who make the journey and get to stay. All the others would die for the chance.)
I skipped The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - Jesus, Aslan, etc, I wasn't in the mood for it - and went straight to Prince Caspian, which was.... huh. So much less good than I remembered? It's the apologetics again. Lewis has some things he needs to do/say about walking around in the forest while your Christ-like figure imposes an utter irrationality of a moral code on children, while you the reader are a bit... Caspian? That guy? The one in the title? Is he okay? We're worried about him? The Pevensie children don't meet him till literally 80% of the way through the book, because they've been going in circles for pages. I do like Caspian, but oddly this, the book with his name on, is not the one where he has character development. His story is strange - the war he's waging never reaches much of a culmination; Peter and Edmund decide the war should be a single combat instead, and the Pevensie sisters take part in the strangest, most PG-rated bacchanal in literature. The fauns drink grape juice. Caspian is descended from South Sea mutineers, for some reason. The kids go home. I just don't understand half of what's happening in that book.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is excellent. Just full of bangers. Caspian has character development! Eustace Clarence Scrubb, who almost deserved it! Reepicheep the Mouse! (Who actually first appears in the previous book, let's be fair - and let's be fair throughout about how funny Lewis is, in every book, consistently. The other animals telling the Mice to shut up, they were conscripted as scouts and not a concert party, made me cackle on the Tube. How do the Talking Animals of Narnia know what a concert party is!!) And the wild, wonderful set pieces, like Eustace and the dragon, the bouncing Dufflepuds, the island where dreams come true, the island that turns everything to gold - it's all brilliant and so enduringly memorable. This is the book that ends with the news Edmund and Lucy are never to return to Narnia, and this is the thing that I, the Hindu child and then adult, couldn't parse. Who is this Lion that they listen to what he says all the time. That he can't be questioned. Why is it all so bloody mystical. And why are the Pevensie children never treated like adults - a question in contrast with Diggory, who is treated like one, for certain values thereof. But the Pevensies grow to adulthood in Narnia - a mythic, high-register, sexless adulthood. They are fully grown kings and queens, but without children of their own or adult attachments - except we know they must have had those things, because we know that the Narnian royal line did not immediately die out without them. But they return to England as children, and then, don't grow to adulthood a second time. They're killed as teenagers, perhaps early twenty-somethings, and are sent back to Narnia, this time not to age. All except Susan - who has been cast away from a land where she was a queen, for the crime of "lipstick and nylons". Adulthood, it turns out, might be a sin.
All of which is to say, the Hindu conception of a moral agent is very, very far from these stories; except for Diggory; and he's the one who has found his agency through grief, through his glimpse into the complete fully-formed adulthood none of the other main characters achieve. Ultimately you have to rely on mysticism to make Narnia work, and that was Lewis's project and you can't complain about it. You can complain about his racism, but that's another story.
Diwali isn't till tomorrow, actually! But I'm so pleased about it all.
I'm having a bit of an existential time, otherwise. Writing has been bad, it's making me feel genuinely sick and sad, and I've been worrying a lot about my Wednesdays. If I don't write on them, and I don't work on them, what do I do? Related: cluster is why I don't work in the mornings, but if cluster isn't hitting me every day, then what am I doing with my time? And that, inexorably, has been turning into - well, what am I doing with my life? I'm having trouble with that. My therapist, who is helpful sometimes, gave me advice, and then started laughing at herself for just... giving me advice, against all tenets of the therapeutic relationship. It was good advice, I think. It was - do nothing. Stop trying to get a grip on your life. Fill each Wednesday with whatever you feel like doing that day.
I'm trying it. We'll see what happens. So far it seems to have been reading a lot of children's literature, Joan Aiken, CS Lewis, Judy Blume - and I was actually going to divide this part about the books from the rest of the post, but it strikes me that "Hindu adult reads books intended for Christian children" is a pretty good segue. I'm not sure why I went to the idea of Narnia as something untaxing of the brain, but I started with The Magician's Nephew because it was my favourite as a kid, and you know, it holds up. It's my favourite because it's one of the few books I can think of that that understands grief, and does so economically, in a few words. Diggory, who I think is the most fleshed-out of Lewis's main characters - he's the only Narnia child, after all, to reach middle age - is, the narrative tells us, the only real adult in Narnia on the first day it's created, other than Aslan. The cabman and his wife who will be king and queen don't count; neither does terrible Uncle Andrew; nor does the Witch. Diggory at ten knows his mother is dying; and it's that, not magic, or magic rings, or even time, that opens him to grief, and the moral agency of adulthood. It's hard sometimes to get anything of real power out of Lewis - he's doing Christian apologetics. that's what he's doing, that's what you've gotta be signed up for - but I think this is a rare real example.
(One thing I have never understood about this book. King Frank and Queen Helen are humans, brought from our world to Narnia - and they get to stay. They are the only two humans who make the journey and get to stay. All the others would die for the chance.)
I skipped The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - Jesus, Aslan, etc, I wasn't in the mood for it - and went straight to Prince Caspian, which was.... huh. So much less good than I remembered? It's the apologetics again. Lewis has some things he needs to do/say about walking around in the forest while your Christ-like figure imposes an utter irrationality of a moral code on children, while you the reader are a bit... Caspian? That guy? The one in the title? Is he okay? We're worried about him? The Pevensie children don't meet him till literally 80% of the way through the book, because they've been going in circles for pages. I do like Caspian, but oddly this, the book with his name on, is not the one where he has character development. His story is strange - the war he's waging never reaches much of a culmination; Peter and Edmund decide the war should be a single combat instead, and the Pevensie sisters take part in the strangest, most PG-rated bacchanal in literature. The fauns drink grape juice. Caspian is descended from South Sea mutineers, for some reason. The kids go home. I just don't understand half of what's happening in that book.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is excellent. Just full of bangers. Caspian has character development! Eustace Clarence Scrubb, who almost deserved it! Reepicheep the Mouse! (Who actually first appears in the previous book, let's be fair - and let's be fair throughout about how funny Lewis is, in every book, consistently. The other animals telling the Mice to shut up, they were conscripted as scouts and not a concert party, made me cackle on the Tube. How do the Talking Animals of Narnia know what a concert party is!!) And the wild, wonderful set pieces, like Eustace and the dragon, the bouncing Dufflepuds, the island where dreams come true, the island that turns everything to gold - it's all brilliant and so enduringly memorable. This is the book that ends with the news Edmund and Lucy are never to return to Narnia, and this is the thing that I, the Hindu child and then adult, couldn't parse. Who is this Lion that they listen to what he says all the time. That he can't be questioned. Why is it all so bloody mystical. And why are the Pevensie children never treated like adults - a question in contrast with Diggory, who is treated like one, for certain values thereof. But the Pevensies grow to adulthood in Narnia - a mythic, high-register, sexless adulthood. They are fully grown kings and queens, but without children of their own or adult attachments - except we know they must have had those things, because we know that the Narnian royal line did not immediately die out without them. But they return to England as children, and then, don't grow to adulthood a second time. They're killed as teenagers, perhaps early twenty-somethings, and are sent back to Narnia, this time not to age. All except Susan - who has been cast away from a land where she was a queen, for the crime of "lipstick and nylons". Adulthood, it turns out, might be a sin.
All of which is to say, the Hindu conception of a moral agent is very, very far from these stories; except for Diggory; and he's the one who has found his agency through grief, through his glimpse into the complete fully-formed adulthood none of the other main characters achieve. Ultimately you have to rely on mysticism to make Narnia work, and that was Lewis's project and you can't complain about it. You can complain about his racism, but that's another story.
no subject
on 2025-10-20 10:00 pm (UTC)