Book Review: Sudeep Adhikari

Auto-Disruption
by Sudeep Adhikari

2022, 84 pages, $10.00

Weasel Press (USA)

An impressive work of scholarship and poetry: investigation, exegesis, commentary on the thought of acknowledged great thinkers, philosophers, theologians, etc., both east & west, ancient and modern. A sort of compendium, in poetic form, of intellectual discourse, from Socrates and Diogenes to Foucault and John Cage; Buddha and Dogen to Naropa and Krishnamurti.

     Despite the esoteric nature of the subject matter, this work is not a dry analysis only, but a mix of highly specific terminology and poetic phraseology, with an occasional nod to the modern Zeitgeist. In the poem “diogenes” Sudeep writes “in the annals/of the least amount of f**k/that has been/ever given by any person; diogenes in always THE MAN” (my capitals, his lower case usage) “standing next/ to the great Jeff Lebowski, the dude.”

Sudeep Adhikari

     Some of these poems can be formidable for those, like myself, with only a nodding acquaintance to the work of some of the philosophers under discussion. The scope of this book is awesome but occasionally floats above understanding—skirting limits of my comprehension. This is the work of a philosopher-engineer-poet with an anarchic disposition (Sudeep has worked as a structural-engineer).

     In the following, I give synopses, in paraphrase, of poems that are, oftentimes, themselves synopsis.

     ARISTOTLE: “the greatest logician that ever lived”—he who “inspired” the species in realization that though logic is not everything, “without it” we are no better than “mindless brutes.”

     EUCLID deduced a world “logical and coherent”—which is not the world we live in, but his deduction, in his time, was a “novel world-view”—that found voice in Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kepler.

Wayne F. Burke

     DEMOCRITUS understood that “matter… is an assemble/of microscopic atoms, swirling/autonomously in a matrix of a deeper void”—which has held good for 2500 years; thus, Democritus is the “atomic King.”

     FREUD looked into the “darkest nooks/of our psyche” and tried, but failed, to “make a science of mind,” because, the world—“an interconnected whole”—“is an ever-moving mess.”

     KARL MARX “dreamt/of collective emancipation/of the proletariat/and the understanding/of history—scientific and rational… /but the thing is… there is nothing/we can learn from history:/because what is/in store, is what we will never know.”

     DANIEL DENNETT: “consciousness is nothing but the noise/of a super-computer/we haven’t invented yet.”

 

    WOLFGANG PAULI: “the world is a continuity/between our/unconscious and our awake thoughts.”

     FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE said that we have “forgotten to dance”—have lost “ourselves/in… dionysian frenzy” and become “bound” by rules of a dead god. New men, with “will to power” will create “new values—a new world-life.”

     SOCRATES “the seeker” did not try to “find the truth; but to live/in a state of watchful delight.”

     These encapsulations, as superficial as they are, hopefully give the reader an idea of the broad range and depth of the work. Work that, as I’ve written above, is impressive scholarship… The poetry adds savor to the thing.

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Sudeep Adhikari is from Kathmandu, Nepal, has a PhD in structural-engineering and works as a structural engineer/Lecturer: His poetry has appeared in many literary journals/magazines and a few anthologies around the world. Also a Pushcart Prize nominee for the year 2018. AUTO DISRUPTION is his sixth published book of poetry. Sudeep digs punk-rock, good beer; industrial hip-hop, noise-rock, dark memes, philosophy, dubstep, poetry, and science.

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Wayne F. Burke's poetry has been published widely online and in print. He is author of eight published poetry collections and one collection of short stories (TURMOIL & Other Stories, Adelaide Press, NY, 2020). Two of his book reviews have previously appeared in SETU. He lives in the central area of Vermont, USA.

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Setu, May 2022

Wayne F. Burke: Poetry (Western Voices 2021)

Bio: Wayne F. Burke's poetry has been published widely online and in print. He is author of eight published poetry collections and one collection of short stories (TURMOIL & Other Stories, Adelaide Press, NY, 2020).  Two of his book reviews have previously appeared in SETU. He lives in the central area of Vermont, USA.

 

Translation

 

Navigating the wet sidewalks

clumped with snow & ice

I reach the river of babble-on

murmuring, like

a crowd in a theater before

the curtain rises—

whispering, like the children

in bed before lights out—

it babbles of wetness, no

doubt,

speaking in fluidities…

I cannot translate the

croak of the crow

or

the screech of the wind

either.

 

Perfect

 

A blue infinitude and

dreamy clouds

above the sun

sinking down

to a horizon of

ridge line pines

marching along the crest

left right left

as a jet

coming in from the west

lays a stream of smoke

like a needle

to stitch a rent

should one appear

in the perfectly blue

sky.

 

 

Kalpas to Go

A howling baby

starts the world again

world without end

or beginning

we are born into

again and again

until Nirvana when

all karmic debts

paid

the wheel of samsara

stops

to let off

a Buddha

while the rest

have kalpas to go

before arrival at

the golden silent hall of knowing

birth-less and

death-less.

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Western Voices 2021 :: Setu, February 2021

Relational Universalism by Sudeep Adhikari

Book Review by Wayne F. Burke

RELATIONAL UNIVERSALISM

Sudeep Adhikari

283 pages

Price $15.00

Printed in the USA

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     Sudeep Adhikari is an engineering consultant by trade and poet by proclivity. He lays down a heavy rap; a long and mostly fascinating rap, delving into mysteries of existence, origins, and creation, while considering complex systems, economic, psychologic, societal, technologic, etc. He attempts to explicate meaning of life, cosmos, and consciousness through a multi-disciplinary approach (philosophic, artistic, spiritual, scientific-religious). In the attempt offering “Relational Universalism,” a “philosophical,” he writes, rather than “scientific” theory—relational not atomic, a “convoluted and relational whole.” Offering a new paradigm, in fact; one of holistic approach in response to failures of traditional scientific and religious modes of thinking. Those old causual, reductionistic, mechanistic paradigms (Cartesian, Newtonian, Euclidian) inadequate, Sudeep claims, in explication of life, cosmos, or consciousness.

Sudeep Adhikari

     The false paradigms (Cartesian, etc.) of duality have duped us, Sudeep suggests. “Straight-jacketed” out presumptions into reductionistic, linear, and causualistic thinking. The dualism of these out-molded paradigms mistakenly viewing, Sudeep argues, mind and body as separate, instead of interconnected. The proposition of Relational Universalism means a switch from the linear-causualistic outlook to a more relational world-view. A world-view more holistic, dynamic, and processorial than the world-view of dualistic paradigms, thus, a more truthful or more exact reflection of life, cosmos, or consciousness.

     Consciousness one of the complex systems, economic, societal, environmental, technological, etc., Sudeep considers, stating that consciousness cannot be comprehended in totality through current scientific methodology. He offers his own relational definition of the noumenon, speaking as much as poet as engineer: “a process, a becoming, an ever proliferation; a coexistence of convergence and divergence, a mobious-strip…inexact whole, plural category, that creates, recreates, destructs, deconstructs, dissipates…an incomprehensible rhizomatic fuzz of randomness, chaos, and multiplicity.”

Wayne F. Burke

     Each complex system (several already named) has its day in court; that is, approached relationally. No answers to age old perplexities are found here. What is found are new questions to ask, more relevant ones than the old in addressing the flux of “life” in all permutations.

     Sudeep has written an intriguing book, erudite, unquestionably broad in scope-- ancient Greece to modernity, and of great depth (though as a non-science person, I cannot, with much confidence, judge exact depth). This is expository prose, utilitarian, freighted with technical terminology, and some tidbits of personal information. Unavoidably dry at times (for this reader), but even during the most abstruse considerations, the narrative unfaltering.

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Setu, November 2020

Love's Autobiography: The Ends of Love, by Duane Vorhees

Duane Vorhees

Review by: Wayne F. Burke

The Many Loves of Duane Vorhees: Love’s Autobiography: The Ends of Love
Author: Duane Vorhees
Hog Press
128 pages
14.95$

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A work of multifaceted variety in style, form, and, of course, language: full of surprises and incomparably witty at times; chock-full of tongue-in-cheek humor and verbal slap-stick. A work of “yogapoetry,” by a self-professed “recovering romantic, intelligent yet unutterably inelegant.” A “gossamer-armored middleaged scholar,” gone to fat (“fat as an apple”), and bald, in the last year of his 6th decade, and still going strong, stronger even than in his younger self.

Wayne F. Burke

   Vorhees delights in word-play and onomatopoeic language usage: “Doak-Doak, Doak-Doak” (sound of chickens). “pleeztomeetyu/whaddayudu?” Some pieces read smooth as notes from the trumpet of Miles Davis while others are “awkward as the balance between meanly accurate/and the motley’s drooling stutter.” Vorhees swims in metaphor, cataloging along the way, the “sweet menus/of Venus.” “Fruitful coconuts,” and “gum drop breasts,” with “licorice thighs.” There are “hidden valleys” to explore; caves in which the “stalactite (is) buried and unearthed through the long geologeons of night.” The body as sustenance, as in “the graceful arc of the taut banana.” The unmentionable act done “with joy unmatched/up/and/down/and/up/an ocean-rhythmed merry-go-round.” A “grand” symphony of the “organs” occurs. Eroticism and Eros mingle and mix: lust & love compete. “What we seek is really Sex/and love’s just one means to our end.” Maybe because Love the more difficult more trying choice. Love is “a Virgin in a Sherman tank, a saint in burnished chain mail.” Love is “like a guillotine. As mundane, as keen.” Vorhees uses battle imagery to convey a struggle between sexes: We must enforce “our missionary positions,” he writes, and “expose our privates at the front.” Some trysts lead to emotional stand-offs, as in ‘Queen of Denial’ when a tear escapes down her “Alcatraz cheek” (and in ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong,’ when “possibilities won’t swell any more.”) In ‘Ley Line,’ a great erotic poem, Vorhees outdoes himself in exquisite description--”that starts at the muscular center of fizzog expressions”-- of his delight in particulars of the bodily construct of his partner.

     This work is oftentimes sensuously rhythmic; Vorhees is a poet of meter and rhyme, regular and irregular. Usage of rhyme can be a tricky business: great whenever it “works”--as in “Giraffic/I lever through the sweat the noise the dirt the traffic.” Far less great when the rhyme scheme seems forced, self-consciously clever and obvious, even gratuitous: “so unlike Jenny/so many a man has worn her face, so many evenings. Her leaving goes down with flimsy haste.”

     Vorhees does interesting work with punctuation. Full colons bracket lines (Faulkner applied same style in his prose). Inventive use of the / (slash), in one poem using a series of them, like drawn sabers, in comparing a sexual tryst to a battle (‘VAN/ITY’).

     Like the Metaphysical poets of 17th century, Vorhees is inventive and has a love of intellectual elaboration. I do not claim to be able to follow all the pathways these poems lead down. The ones I have followed, I have enjoyed thoroughly, and, I am sure, so will you.

Setu, August 2019