Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - Eduardo Galeano was my 5th of 2021, and first on Kindle.
Mirrors are filled with people.
The invisible see us.
The forgotten recall us.
When we see ourselves, we see them.
When we turn away, do they?
Then there was no looking back, with snippets about anything and everything - beginning with life:
Life was alone, no name, no memory. ......Life was one, and one was none...Then desire drew his bow. The arrow of desire split life down the middle, and life was two. .....
Then begin the story right from Adam and Eve. A feast on foot. The entire world was our kingdom. An immense map without border, and our legs were the only passport required. With racism we developed amnesia, and forgo that we all belong to one, and are descendants of the first couple from Africa.
How could our ancestors draw, paint and create art work , with so much of beauty? Where they he or she? In the fields of our labour we worshipped goddesses of fertility, women of vast hips generous breasts. Art tells us desert was no desert. Separate were heaven and earth, good and bad, birth and death. Day and night never mixed. Woman was woman and man was man. We shared food and helped each other for defense. It was not me first, do your own thing civilization. We got tired of wandering through the forest and along the banks of rivers.
The results of civilization were surprising: our lives became more secure, but less free and we worked a lot harder. Left far behind were the times when we drifted without home or destination. We discovered the words "yours" and "mine", land became owned, and women became the property of men and fathers the owners of children.
Iraq was the birthplace of words. We are dust and nothing, all that we do is more than wind. They started naming. They named the seven planet, which took form of the days of the week. Beer travelled to Egypt from Iraq. Wine too was present since stone age. Then there are stories of Ganesha from India, Osiris & Isis from Egypt, Isis; Hatsheput who called herself king. Egyptian society not only built pyramids, it was one.
At the base lay the landless peasant.
The farmer wears his yoke.
His shoulders sag under the weight.
On his neck he has a festering sore.
In the morning, he waters leeks.
In the evening, he waters coriander.
At midday, he waters palm trees.
Somtimes he sinks down and dies.
In his fist they place a few grain of wheat.
In case he feel like eating :-(
Yamato from Japan, how he killed his own brother, took control of everything at At dusk, he challenged him.
The Art of War:
Twenty-five centuries ago, General Sun Tzu of China wrote the first treaties on military tactics and strategy. His sage advice is still heeded today not just on battlefields but in business, where blood tends to flow more freely:
If you are able, appear unable.
If you are strong, appear weak.
When you are near, appear distant.
Never attack when the enemy is powerful.
Always avoid battles you cannot win.
If you are weaker, retreat.
If your enemies are united, divide them.
Advance when they are unprepared
and attack where they least expect it.
To know your enemy, know yourself.
Horror of War:
Lao Tse, village philosopher, was travelling the paths of contradiction, which led to the secret place where water and fire fuse. In contradiction all meets nil, life meets death, near meets far, before meets after. He believed that knowing war teaches peace, because suffering inhabits glory:
Every action provokes reactions.
Violence always returns.
Only thistles and thorns grow where armies encamp.
War summons hunger.
He who delights in conquest, delights in human pain.
Every victory should be celebrated with a funeral.
Dragon Dau Fu tried to cross the sky mounted on one of the ten suns, unable to bear the heat, set ablaze by the sun, crazed by thirst, the dragon dropped into the first river he saw. , he drank the water to the last drop, leaving nothing but a long bed of yellow clay where the river had been. This version is claimed to be non scientific by some, and the reason they attribute is felling of the forest on its bank.
Then comes the story of Yi and Yu. Yi from the ten sun, and how though initally immortal, he became mortal,. After drought came flood, and Yu, the lame god, came to rescue the world. Hobbling along, Yu ventured into the flood and with his shovel opened canals and tunnels to drain the furious waters. Yu was assisted by a fish that knew the river's secrets, by a dragon that went first and deflected the current with his tail, and by a tortise that went last and carried away all the mud.
(Reminded of the first three Avtara of Vishnu)
Cang Jie invented words/letters after much study of the design of constellations, the profile of mountains and the plumage of birds. He created the symbols that spell words.
(Then comes the story of Prahlad and Narasimha) : Shun, Lord Hibiscus, reigned over China. Hou ji, Lord Millet, was his minister of agriculture. The two had faced a number of difficulties in childhood. right from birth, Shun's father and his older brother detested him. They set fire to the house when he was a baby, but he was not even singed. so they put him in a hold in the ground and threw in enough dirt to buy him completely, but he was not bothered in the least. Even the minister was tortured, they tried to kill him, ditch him in the woods for the tiger to ear. When the tiger paid no heed, she tossed him into snowdrift so the cold would put an end to him. (Story of Ayyapa) A few days later she found him in good humor and slightly overheated.
Lu Shi was belived to have found the art of silk making, she fled from china with the art; so for the country she was a traitor but form Yutian's point of view, she was a heroine of the country she ruled.
China comes from Chin, Chin Shi Huang, its first emperor. Through blood and fire, he transformed warring fiefdoms into a nation. He imposed a common language and a common system of weights and measures, and he created a single currency of bronze coins with a hole in the center. To protect his domain he raised the Great Wall, an endless crest of stone that crossed the map and is still, twenty-two hundred years later, the most visited defensive barricade in the world. He created a great theater for him to die too.
A couple of centuries ago, Li Ju-Chen invented an upside-down China. His novel, The flowers in the Mirror, took place in a country of women, where women ruled. In the story she was he, and he, she. .....
For over a thousand years, until well into the twentieth century, the canons of beauty would not allow a girl's foot to grow. The first version of Cinderella, written in the 9th century china, gave literary form the the male fetis for the diminutive female foot, and at the same time give or take a year, the custom of binding daughters' feet from infancy took root. it was about more than aesthetic ideals. Bound feet also bind; they were shields of virtue. By preventing women form waling freely, they foiled any indecent escapades that might have put the family honor at risk.
Men wonders, without knowing what he wonders, could woman be an entrance with no exit? Could it be that he who enters her, in her will remain? Woman's property some men thought to be theirs.
Victorious Sun, Moon Vanquished.
The moon lost her fist battle against the sun when he spread word that it wasn't the wind who was impregnating women, then history brought more sad news; the division of labor assigned nearly all tasks to the females so that males could dedicate themselves to mutual extermination, the right to property and the right to inheritance allowed women to be owners of nothing, the organization of the family enclosed them in the case of father, husband and son, and along came the state, which was like the family, only bigger.
Hindu Goddess Mita is mother of all, but Hindu tradition warns, "A lascivious woman is poison, serpent and death all in one"... There has been many women who threw themselves into the dead husband's pyre but not a single man.
Lucifer was the favourite archangel of the god, when he tried to raise his throne higher than the stars, god turned him to ash.
And then writes " Neither can anyone figure out what he has to do with Christ".
One of my favorite and interesting is few negative and then existed? But it exists.
Defend your right to think, Thinking wrongly is better than not thinking at all. So said Hypatia, many people came to hear her talk, some praised her intelligence some criticized her and in the year 415, a women was stripped naked, "It will be investigated ' said the prefect of the city.
Six centuries after the death of Jesus, Mohammed died, the founder of Islam, who by Allah's permission had 12 wives nearly Allah's the same time, left 9 widows and by Allah's prohibition, none remarried. Youngest was Ayesha. Sometimes later she raised an armed uprising against caliph Imam Ali. The bloodletting launched the enormity between Sunnis and Shiites, and this was irrefutable proof that women make a mess of things when they escape the bedroom and kitchen.
Abu Ali al-Ma'arri who died in 1057 in Syria wrote:
There are two kinds of people in this land:
Those who have brains but no religion
And those who have religious but no brains,
Fate smashes us as if we were made of grass
And never again will our pieces come together
The poet was blind. So they say.
King Darius of Persia praised "this cane that makes honey without bees". And long before him the Indians and the Chinese knew of it.
Sorrow strike not because the priests prayed poorly, but because their faithful were unfaithful.
Peasants, children all were looked down at. Many Thanked God for not making them a women.
At the time of Marco Polo, Europe knew nothing of petroleum, coal, paper money, large ships, rhinoceroses, high dunes or asbestos. All these were used in China. Emperor Chin and Phil who lived almost at the same time lived in another world.
European are unable to forgive Jew, Jesus was a Jew, and Palestine is paying the prize for it. Spain and Turkey kept changing religion. Poor people remain poor, could it because we are fed by their hunger and clothed by their nakedness?
Why are some walls so loud? Some so mute? Me, We shortest poem.
Then there is the Riddle:
They are the most important members of our family. They are gluttons, devouring gas, oil, corn, sugarcane, and anything else that comes their way. They own our time: bathing them, feeding and sheltering them, talking about them, and opening the way for them. They reproduce faster than we do, and are ten times as numerous as they were half a century ago. They kill more people than do wars, but no one condemns the murders, least of all the newspapers and television channels that live off their advertisements. They steel our streets. They steal our air. They laugh when they hear us say: "I drive".
Who is they?
We are the machines of our machines, they claim innocence and they are right. Things get free? Even water is becoming costly.
And the book ends with Lost and Found. The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited. The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor's footsteps. In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon. But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be? Perhaps they were never misplaced. Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.
A subtle yet loud perspective to various events in history, said in a simple, rhyming and thought provoking words. Thanks a lot to Bindu Manoj, for her periodic updates on Facebook, and the final one saying, if there is one book you read, let that be Mirrors. Glad I read this. Inspired by her post I got the book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano; and it was so gripping. As I looked at her Facebook page to Thank her, for the beautiful posts as, they are very enriching with so much of history, in lyrical chunks. Amazing. Just Finished. Prayer & Love, Now, her post read:
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