[Reader-list] My Dear Ego

[pratap pandey]

Dear All,

My dear ego has no bones to pick with any other ego.
Because, it has had no opportunity to have "security"
problems.

In other words, I can laugh, since there is nothing to
be afraid, or afeared, or possessive, or defensive
about.

I can laugh at... . I can be laughed at. We can laugh
about. We should laugh at each other.

Various postings have undercut everything I, or Prof
Saint, have "thundered" at (apparently) each other.
Thank you.

Laugh at us, List people. It is immaterial to me
whether there exists an Ego-hassle between Prof Tarun
of Hindu College and Prof Pratap of Jamia. The point
is, you must laugh at us, at our posturings. That's
the correct way.  

My agenda in writing into the List is a single one. I
want to talk about things in a particular way. Namely,
satire. i want to find out if satire can replace
effete sentimentalism as a mode of knowledge, if it is
worth replacing effete sentimentalsim with satire (and
not humour, or irony) as a way of looking at the world
and talking about it.

Satire is a more honest way of talking about things, I
think. The object of satire is nothing less than
reality itself (the world out there, the historically
determined web/matrix of phenomena constantly
re/created, re/searched, the pathologies that grip
people), nothing less than a knowledge of this
reality-in-process.

Satire proves that reality is a put-together,
put-together by labour. Satire "works upon" attitudes,
mindsets, mentalities by trying to "work" them "up".
If humans make their own world, then satire points to
those features of this "making" where "making"
intersects "unmaking". It points to where the "made"
can be "unmade". 

Just because you can hold a grain of rice in your hand
does not mean the grain hasn't been produced. So also
satire. It must present itself as a fashion, as
fashionable, as a form that is about the fashions of
making, and unmaking.

Satire is also enlightenment. In satire, people are
equal because they possess the capacity to laugh.
People therefore understand reality via laughter. 

Laughter is a form of knowledge. It can always be
repressed as irreverence, but can never be relegated
to irrelevance.

In a more extreme version (called Menippean satire),
all people are equal because they shit, piss and eat,
and are primarily bothered about the various orifices
that make up their body, and "rational" selves.

On the List, "I" am an orientation. A Menippean
orientation.

Don't reduce this orientation to "me". "I" take
responsibility for what "I" write on the List. There
can be no satire without ethics. Rabelais (my guru)
was a monk, for G..'s sake!

What "I" like about satire is that it asks the
satirist to lay his/her cards on the table. On the
List, "I" have always done that.

Can you people read and comment on the poems I wrote
and sent into the list?  


      

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