I gave up on Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov. I had a plan and I dumped it immediately, almost as soon as it I tried to execute it. Its always the execution for me because I start to hate the plan when I execute it.
It’s always better for me to execute before planning, it’s better to focus on executing so well and perfectly that it doesn’t matter if the plan was good at all. The plan ruins it for me because I put all my execution into the plan. Its better to put all the execution into the execution. Even an amazing plan needs execution. But the execution can save a bad plan. Actually scratch that I don’t really know that.
I’ve started reading other books, so many books since I tried to read Asimov and hated it.
Astoundingly, I read all of Mahabharata, the Hindu epic. Instead of reading Asimov, who writes cleanly and simply and is astonishingly transparent with his story and clear, I read a translation of a long inscrutable Hindu epic about Krishna, a divine being who is born as a man and incites his troubled relatives to fight a big war with each other. I won’t try to explain how Krishna is related to the people in the story because it is very complicated because there’s a lot of kings and sages fathering children by many women and various women getting pregnant by multiple kings and sages and gods. And Krishna is just another fellow who happens to be the creator of the universe. To clarify not all Hindus consider Krishna the high god. Some Hindus consider him god, some do not, and just consider him to be an important avatar of Vishnu, who is the main god. One of the three main gods. So I think some consider Krishna to be an avatar of Vishnu and some consider Vishnu to be an avatar of Krishna. It’s a subtle distinction. I won’t try to describe the whole story of Mahabharata here because it beggars description. But I do want to point out that in Mahabharata, Krishna is considered to be the main god of the universe, and I enjoyed the idea that he was just one of the guys amongst all the warriors in the story, people would talk to him and sometimes they would casually refer to the fact that he created the universe, as if they were describing his hometown. And the other people would complain to him quite freely about almost everything because basically everything was his fault.
Another thing about Mahabharata is that there are infinite narrators talking about narrators talking about stories within a story within a horse sacrifice. The whole story is told to a king to encourage him to make the horse sacrifice, and at the horse sacrifice he asks someone to tell him the story of the horse sacrifice and they encourage him to make the horse sacrifice with a story about a horse sacrifice at which someone tells someone the story and casually mentions that they heard he was planning a horse sacrifice. It turns out he isn’t sure. Should he go ahead with the horse sacrifice? The Brahmins are all for it, but it’s not their horse, is it?
My second favorite part of the story was the Brahmins. The author critiques the work of several kings in the story, and clearly regards treatment of Brahmins as a critical indicator of a king’s job performance. And tells stories about kings who treat Brahmins well, who are blessed, but tells many more stories about kings who treat Brahmins badly, and who afterwards get horribly cursed. Of course one might suspect that the writer of Mahabharata might have himself been a Brahmin, and a not entirely dispassionate supporter of horse sacrifices.
But one might also note that despite the fact that the kings who mistreated Brahmins always got horribly cursed, there seems to be many more accounts of kings mistreating Brahmins than there are of kings who treated the Brahmins well. Also there are a lot of stories in Mahabharata describing the blessings for women who sleep with Brahmins even when the Brahmins are smelly and dirty. But if they marry the Brahmins they have to practice austerities with them in the woods and get immolated if the Brahmins die first. So the best deal goes to the princesses who just sleep with some old Brahmin, and the next best deal is for the women who marry Brahmins. The worst deal is for the women who refuse the Brahmins. They get cursed, usually a horrible medical condition.
Unsurprisingly, the Mahabharata is attributed to the sage Vyasa, a wily Brahmin. He has the gall to describe his own liaisons at the beginning of the story, chapter 1, wherein he fathers the major characters of Mahabharata with various women. Perhaps he’s making some sort of literary metaphor?
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