Weekly notes 11

I’ve never read a novel quite like the Grapes of Wrath, it is set in Dust Bowl America, both the period and the geography. It describes and paints the market system we live in with such simple, gory detail, that it is haunting. It is a story I would rather not attempt to write about when it still occupies my mind so amorphously. For the time being, I quote from it:

Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddes, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the gruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the poeple who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the grit-and kerosence sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

(…)

There is a crime here the goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows and the sturdy trunks and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the ceritficates-died of malnutrition-because the food must rot, must be forced to rot

(…) and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the soul of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

While still in the mindspace of reading the Grapes of Wrath, I watched Mickey 17 on Sangeetha’s recommendation. Mickey 17 complemented the novel very well. It imagines a space-faring future that is much more realistic. The city is the labour market. The point of the city, and the dreams and imaginations of cities is to create enough desperation and distressed migration so that labour is guaranteed. Enough desperation, so that labour obeys the makers, the owners.

I watched Flow on Sunday. It was a beautiful rendition. I was curious as to how the animals came to be selected, a Cat, a Capybara, a Lemur, a Secretary Bird and a Whale-like creature. Humans seem to have vanished just a few days or weeks before the happenings of the film. They still carry their human trained characteristics. I wonder when we will get films that depict the lives of farm animals without altering their reality for the sake of entertainment. Characters or movies that animate the lives of these farm animals do so to hide their realities. So many (urban) people, to whom I randomly ask the question, ‘how do you get milk?’ (from where? How is it extracted? Where do they live?) have not thought about it.

I’ve been asked why I am a Vegan twice this week, and both times I chose to say that I saw no point in having been vegetarian solely because my parents turned vegetarian later in their life for other reasons. I then gave a pause, and let the person interpret it however they wanted. I shy away from using any more specific thoughts on industrialisation, the scale of cruelty or on specisim. I think this is my middle ground, which allows me to avoid specific debates on being Vegan in India (for I am tired in many ways). I’m not sure if this is good, but eh, I’ll figure it out.

I visited Avalahalli with Eshwari, this time from the rear entrance. I was heart broken previously because at that point the drains for the plots were being constructed. The fields were lost, and the land was barren with the imposition of the straight lines that the plots have brought in. The drains are now constructed but nobody seems to have started construction on the plots themselves. For now, the weeds growing over the plot markers soothed my heart.