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paraclete0407 · 3 years

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Stuff I might never get to do (from books I read after I thought I had mastered the Bible / Scripture)

Theories of ‘political vision’ - ex. Obama’s ‘A Promised Land,’ or from someone I miss, UKPM David Cameron’s ‘For the Record.’ Also records of military careers and the consequences and lessons therefrom, particularly Gen., Prof. Stanley A. McChrystal’s ‘My Share of the Task’ - decades of one meal a day, utterly excellent love-letters and wisdom-writings to his wife, sweeping reports, culminating in the operation that ‘extrajudicially or para-judicially executed’ bin Laden. I also never forgot the NYTimes photo of the SEAL operator’s back-muscles. My giant Obama critique, however, was one of those ‘grandfather Hall of Presidents’ books that I want to postpone.

My mistakes and wishes. Ex. the woman I wanted to marry in early 2011; I had cut off my parents for 6 months and called one night my mom; she got really drunk that night, flirted with foreigners from [ultra-mercenary cram-school that hires anyone], got terrorized by [b/Black man of the type who clearly believes ‘As I am b/Black I know everything worth knowing and can terrorize, antagonize, demonize anyone and anything for the greater glory of my own ego / Chairman Mao]. Culminating in me in the ladies’ room telling her to get up and I told her so, going back to the pub-room and threatening the mercenaries, and finally being ‘mogged,’ masculinity-compromised or eclipsed / overpowered, by the man who was either her surrogate father-figure, rapist, seducee-turned-wrist-breaking-controller, no one really knew, and my ex-father-figure who however either a) failed to bait the trap properly and/or b) failed to communicate the true meaning and message and purpose of his love for me, to me. But, it was instrumental in blowing what was probably the best job I ever had, and the only job that ever asked me back.

After that I started honestly trying to live for either a) the younger generation b) ‘just me.’ I also made a number of hard or soft promises to students involving me writing stuff. Don’t say ‘will’ or ‘might’ to Koreans b/c it kind of spiritually translates in to ‘shall’ or ‘must’ or ‘has to.’ They’re the poor in spirit from what I can tell.

I also drove around California for a while, missed a job-offer from a Catholic university in [central Korean city], and thought a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Studied Emmanuel ‘ethics-as-first-philosophy love-of-wisdom-converting-into-wisdom-of-love’ Levinas a bit, read ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ and couldn’t sleep

Sundry ‘Teacher Dream(s).’ I’d been hoping in a way that ‘Free Food for Millionaires’ author Min Jin Lee, JD Yale etc, would put this all in her ‘American Hagwon’ but she’s been baking fancy cakes and writing offside / deflective lit. about Japanese gays for like 10 years while NK marched on in real life killing people and Koreans were also dying from numerous causes, running away from home, economically induced suicide, amazing shame- and rape-culture: cashing in. I remember my last night at the hagwon, a time of bonhomie, when I perhaps might’ve even said, ’Y’know, can I un-resign-in-protest?’ Boss, What’ll you miss most about Korea, Korean women?’ Me (playing the fool), ‘There are Korean women in America.’ Boss, (sforzando), ‘Gyopo women.’

My ‘best guess’ anyway at ‘edubusiness’ was sth I labored at off and on for now like 6 years called ‘Three Kings’ which is partly about a white ex-literary agent family named ‘Foch’ after the French Generalissime who actually won WW1, famous for his ‘moral factor’ theory of war as well as his remark, ‘This is not a peace but an armistice for 20 years. He makes 400,000 dollars in his 1st year of college by advising his roommate to publish his ‘freshman’ novel with an extreme ‘point,’ not worrying about winning every possible reader, just let me edit all the sign-post-phrases and tell you what I firmly believe you were trying to write, sell this novel for 2million dollars, marry the Korean girl across the hall, forget RU, cultivate life and love with your stylus, and I’ll continue to march on simultaneously trying to promote love while reading everyone and everything semi-against or [angle / thrust-vector to] their grain (for their own good). Later he starts a school with his two friends, an MD/PhD program dropout from LA and an MBA ex-Samsung Managing Director or something. But in the end his MD/PhD friend can’t stop thinking about [student’s] amazing breasts and [MBA] friend can’t stop hating and short-selling himself w/r/t marriage and self-regard b/c he’s stuck in the other-always-has-more-money-always-more-money-to-make mentality. In the end the protagonist resigns in protest from the company he himself designed, developed, planned, etc. but didn’t have the money to call his own after reaching the position of ‘Joint Department Head’ which is kind of like ‘Chief of Staff’ to a president at a much smaller scale. He’s a devout literal Christian or at least Christianist who wishes the world were Christian and he reflects in the end on the Longfellow poem about the Three Kings who ‘know King Herod’s hate’ and had to travel back to their homelands a different way. There is also a possibly-to-be-deleted ‘Interludio Meridiana’ where he happens across the molested constantly male-gazed student in Nonhyeon (a neighborhood South of the Han River but not at all like the PSY song), starts to hear Palestrina’s ‘Sicut Cervus’ (listen to it on YouTube - Palestrina’s polyphony philosophy is one of the crowns of human art) in his head, wanders down to the bus depot and finds that his thoughts / creativity etc. have become cathected, chained to, or at least led by memory, and he has joined a ‘chain of being’ that connects the past to the future.

‘Bethlehem Dream’ - kind of my homage to the forementioned Kim Minju of IZ*ONE, my last favorite pop-star before assuring Christian friend I’d stop following K-pop (I’m against BlackPink and their entire organization). Connects to all my dreams and theories of education - including my extreme disillusionment with education, and sympathy for anyone made the ‘beneficiary’ of the latest theory or tool - as well my homage to the school that most closely approximates my dream school, Prof,. Pastor, Dr. Chancellor John Piper’s Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis. And also, women’s desire to have children / babies, even without husbands, men’s desire to bear spiritual fruit with or without traditional fellowship.

Masculinity in novels. Not Norman Mailer Philip Roth stuff but novels that can lens reality from the top down and not get addicted to some or other cupidity or method of endearing / charming the audience, which often makes them stupider or causes them to regard hidden truth as an outright lie and/or triviality. MJL’s ‘Free Food for Millionaires’ was pretty masculine; better is billionaire Michael Kim’s ‘Offerings,’ a novel I wish I could teach someone only I can’t find a good student / reader and maybe I myself missed the point and only thought I got it.

Thinking quitting while ahead - I really don’t know whether adding to people’s minds and knowledge at this point in Time is good or whether writing amounts to feasting the already glutted, furnishing them further excuses for disbelief and inaction and alienating / dividing them from the hungry and poor. I like a song called ‘Love Song for No. 1.’ Remember talking about a walk in the woods I took, understanding something about the Other’s first language the authenticity of this language and its nativity to their understanding and ‘originary’ or ‘birth-mother’ identity or ‘self-system.’ Not something to tell your Anglo-but-ish-they-were-Teutonic biological parents because they will make like they want to backhand your head off then spend years denying they’re either racist, non-believers, or what I have come to call anti-believers; people who amid ‘Delta Covid Summer’ are trying to destroy the beliefs of others. Also Dr. R.C Sproul Ligonier Ministries, ‘Forgetfulness is apostasy.’

‘Flowers on Water.’ Kind of my homage to Krystal Jung Soojung of ‘hieroglyphic’ girl-group f(x) and later IMO excellent actress, her best moment perhaps the final episode of ‘My Lovely Girl,’ a shocking and awesome scene that appears to talk about Resurrection and Eternity. The protagonist is another cynical edubusinessman who is thinking about mass-death, getting mad at mainstream American Christianity for singing songs while people were drowning, and finally on Google Books comes across a teacher-poem from 1881 titled ‘Flowers,’ for a group of rather hapless seemingly American Indian students in California as well as critiques of educational praxis which, in 1881, were identical to what they are today. ‘God is sovereign in all things’ - such a difficult category. I abandoned this novel for a number of reasons such as the belief that I might be able to reverse-engineer Brad Thor or something for a quick buck. Went to Half Price Books (now closed) where they had a picture of the Jackson Five over the toilet in the men’s room. I read a bit of a one-dollar Brad Thor book about Russia but on the way on home I once started once again dreaming mytically about Korean girls / women as it began to snow and thinking about ‘Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming’ (’Es Ist Ein Rosentsprungen) the German Nativity song which Michael Praetorius composed at least in part in response to the appalling Reformation Wars and out of a hope or wish that remembrance of Christ’s birth could somehow reunite the Church. This also made me think about a high school I admire / respect and my old friend and his now-divorced wife with whom I many times fantasized about singing and talking with again; and whom I kind of wish I could tell the author of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ remarried his first wife eventually but IDK what good it is to give already-dreaming people more dreams either.

It’s 9:35 AM and my ‘insomnia’ type notebook-postings haven’t made me any new friends in a while. My last thing is just, if you care about Education or young girls / American women / culture / schools, achievement, heroines, stories, or for that matter Bible-translation or the latter-day odysseys of the nominal Episcopalian Church, with trembling heart, try to reflect on Headmaster Josiah Bunting III’s ‘All Loves Excelling.’

One of my favorite Christian songs is ‘The Death of King David’

And God said that day shall dawn

to bring that flow’r newly born

from thy stem in fullness growing

in fragrance sweet night and morn

all My people shall adorn

with Breath of life bestowing

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

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the-end-of-art · 3 years

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Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created? How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette. Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind, that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song. This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

#Nin Andrews #poem #poet #poetry

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harrisonstories · 5 years

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In this photo Natalya Sazanova is on the far right, Sripad Maharaj is to the left of Ravi Shankar, and George Harrison is behind them (1974)

Tuitions in Vrindavan: When a Russian Indologist taught George Harrison Hindi (20 Sep. 2019)

by Ajay Kamalakaran

When she agreed to teach the legendary English singer Hindi in the 1970s, India scholar Natalya Sazanova had no idea who the Beatles were. Over four months of lessons, George Harrison preferred to keep his fame a secret

On an otherwise uneventful day in Vrindavan in 1974, Natalya Sazanova, a Russian Indologist with a deep interest in Hinduism, was introduced to a “charming young” Englishman by sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar. Decades later, Sazanova, who was one of the best-known professors at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, would tell Russian newspaper Novie Izvestiya in an interview that the young man, who had a ponytail and was wearing a “checkered American jacket and Indian sarong” listened closely as Ravi Shankar and Sazanova spoke in Hindi.

The Russian was so proficient in Hindi that she had defended a thesis on the work of Hindi playwright Bharatendu Harischandra for her candidature of philological sciences degree (equivalent to a masters in philosophy) in 1962.

“George,” who did not understand what the conversation was about, asked the Russian Indologist to teach him Hindi.

“He had an absolute talent,” Sazanova said. While most of her students took about six years to master conversational Hindi, the Beatle managed to learn well in just four months of “irregular” classes. “George grasped the spoken language on the fly. He particularly learnt bhajans fast and sang them.”

Sazanova was also mesmerised with how George mastered the sitar so quickly. “I was so impressed that I asked him, ‘George, what do you do for a living.’ He was terribly embarrassed [by that time, he was world famous]. He said, ‘Actually, I’m a professional musician.’” She added that Ravi Shankar smiled when he heard this.

The teacher, completely ignorant of her student’s fame, asked him to keep a small concert, to which he agreed. “One of the concerts that George and Shankar arranged for several friends, including me, was on a moonlit night in a deserted spot on the banks of the Yamuna River,” Sazanova said. “It was simply amazing. The three of them played—Ravi Shankar, George and an Indian flautist—and I hadn’t heard anything like it before.”

Unfortunately, there were no recordings of the concerts. “Tape recorders were still rare at that time,” Sazanova said. “Today, I am very sorry that at that time I did not have any device. The only thing left are photo slides.”

Spiritual Path

At that time, Sazonova and Harrison were both pursuing their interest in Hinduism. The Russian’s spiritual guru Sripad Maharaj also had an influence on the Beatle. Harrison’s song It is He (Jai Shri Krishna) was based on a bhajan taught to him by Sripad Maharaj.

Sazanova recalled how spirituality and Hinduism always came up during their lessons. “We could not get around philosophy in conversations with him, but I was engaged in Hare Krishna bhakti,” she said. “As much as I could, I explained to George the connection of music with bhakti. I explained that since everything in the world was connected, words and music could not exist separately.”

Harrison, who was well versed with the Bhagavad Gita, chanted the Hare Krishna mantra, and regularly communicated with Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness or ISKCON, as it’s popularly called. “More than once I attended their meetings and I can say that George always listened very carefully to what the guru told him.”

Harrison never spoke of his fame or international stature during those four months. Once their lessons were over, he wrote a small note in Sazanova’s diary. “I was extremely happy to meet you. You made a tremendous impression on me. God Bless You.”

International Music Sensation

Sazanova did not make too much about her lessons in Vrindavan and thought of them as nothing but one of many pleasant experiences in the country that she had dedicated her life to understanding.

Back in Moscow, she shared her photographs from her time in Vrindavan and then came the excitement. “Oh My God! This is Harrison,” a student screamed. The students then went on explain who the English musician learning Hindi was. They were impressed out of their wits when they heard that George Harrison actually dedicated a song to their teacher at one of his small private concerts by the Yamuna.

It’s a myth that the Beatles were officially banned in the Soviet Union. While anything associated with Western culture was looked upon with great suspicion, there was no Brezhnev-era government call for citizens to not listen to the British band. One of the major reasons that the music of the Beatles wasn’t easily available in the USSR in the mid-1960s was the hostility and envy of Soviet composers. Russian composer Nikita Bogoslovsky once referred to the band as the “dung beetles”.

However, John Lennon’s statement that the band was more popular than Jesus Christ was welcomed by the ideological newspaper Pravda. By the time Sazanova was back in Moscow from Vrindavan, her students would have most likely listened to a poor quality record that was sold by a company called Melodiya. The album cover didn’t have the name of the band but chose to call them a “Vocal Instrumental Ensemble.” Muscovites could also hear the Beatles music on Radio Luxembourg.

The message in Sazanova’s diary and her photographs became the talk of the university in 1975. On hearing that her student in India was a legend in the world of music, she started listening to the Beatles and Harrison’s individual songs. She also listened regularly to her student’s songs that were dedicated to Krishna.

Harrison did not forget his Hindi teacher after he went back to the West. He sent Sazanova a book about Krishna, where he had written the preface. The preface ends with words familiar to each and every fan of the Beatles: ‘Give peace a chance. All you need is love.’

An Illustrious Career in Indology

Sazanova continued her scholarship of Hindi and Sanskrit literature for the next three decades. In 1984, she obtained a PhD by defending a thesis on ‘The Creativity of Surdas and the North Indian Literary Tradition of the 16th to 19th centuries.’

She also cultivated a close friendship with Russian-Indian artist Svetoslav Roerich and his wife, actress Devika Rani. She was on the board of the Moscow Nicholas Roerich Society from its founding in 1980 till her death in 2006.

Sazanova remained a lifelong devotee of Krishna. She was grateful to Harrison for the role he played in popularising Hinduism in the West. In her interview to Novie Izvestiya, she said movements such as “Krishnaism” gave non-Indians the opportunity to access ancient spiritual systems. “Doesn’t George’s sincerity reflect in the (spiritual) songs he composed,” she asked.

In Sazanova’s Footsteps

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, there were no restrictions of any kind on cultural and musical imports. Along with the growth of popularity of their music, rumours resurfaced of the Beatles actually performing in secret in the Kremlin in the 1960s. Some fans still erroneously believe that the song Back to the USSR was inspired either by this “secret performance” or after another (falsely) rumoured visit of the Fabulous Four to Moscow on account of an emergency landing.

When the story of a Moscow State University professor teaching George Harrison Hindi once again began to do the rounds in the Russian capital in 2005, journalist Ekaterina Maksimova, then 18, decided to check if it was a hoax. “It was very difficult to believe the whole story, so my friend and I decided to try and get in touch with Dr Sazanova,” Maksimova says. “We went to the Moscow State University to find her. She was still a part of the faculty of the Institute of Asian and African Studies.”

On hearing that the girls wanted to know more about the Indologist’s experiences with George Harrison, she invited them home. The excited students went to Sazanova’s home on Russian Orthodox Christmas (January 7th) morning in 2006 and saw some photos and the diary. “Some sceptics have raised questions over the authenticity of the autograph, but I have no doubts,” Maksimova says. “George Harrison had a very unique signature; he used to write his name in a very characteristic manner.”

Over cake and tea, Maksimova and three friends spoke to Sazanova in detail about her interactions with Harrison. “We just sat there, pouring in the questions, still in disbelief that George Harrison’s teacher was sitting in front of us,” she says. “It was unreal. It doesn’t happen… We were so excited that it turned into an interrogation about George.”

Even after three decades, the Russian Indologist was in awe of the music legend’s humility, sincerity and manners. “I remember her telling us several times during the conversation that George was polite and modest,” Maksimova says. “She also told us that he took the lessons very seriously and spent a lot of time praying and reading and citing religious texts.”

Sazanova also spoke of her guru Sripad Maharaj, her passion for Hindi literature, Sanskrit and Hinduism, inspiring Maksimova to enroll at the Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. She studied Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu and specialised in Chhayavad-era literature, but unfortunately could not study under Sazanova.

Although Sazanova was still a member of the faculty of the Moscow State University, she was too weak to travel daily to the campus in 2006. A handful of students would go for lessons to her apartment, which was in southwestern Moscow.

“When I called her home in June 2006, her son told me that she had passed away,” Maksimova says. “It was a terrible shock for me. I had always loved India, but I found out about the Institute of Asian and African studies only because of her… But more than that, the very idea of being a student of the same teacher who taught George Harrison, was thrilling. It would almost feel like being his classmate.”

Maksimova, who now works for a leading private television channel in Moscow, is a regular visitor to India and has often contemplated organising Beatles tours to Rishikesh and Vrindavan for Russians.

The transcripts of George Harrison’s interviews about Indian culture and Hinduism have been widely translated into Russian. Ardent fans of the music legend in the country take great pride in his Russian connection and the fact the he was in a way a bridge between Russia and India.

#george harrison #natalya sazanova #ravi shankar #the beatles #sripad maharaj #ajay kamalakaran #open magazine #1974 #dark horse #this is so cool #i've never heard about it before

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