Wendy's theodicy

Theodicy means- 'how come bad things happen to good people?' Wendy Doniger wrote a book on Hindu theodicy way back in the mid Seventies. It was remarkable in that it didn't once mention the correct solution which no one doesn't know- viz. life is a stochastic process, D'uh. Indeed, everything is.  This is why Yuddhishtra, the Just King, has to learn Statistical game theory so as to overcome his 'Vishada' (Depression) and keep his place as the Head of the Pandavas.
Now, it's true that people who pretend to be extra devout or to have an extra sensitive poetic disposition, try to grab attention by pretending that there's some great mystery involving God or their own putrid sexual dysphoria which lies at the heart of Theodicy. Furthermore, Statistics is a deeply boring subject. Yet, Theodicy is only important- at least this is the message of the Mahabharata- in so far as it motivates Mechanism Design- better mixed strategies so fewer good people have bad things happen to them. No genuine Theist, or genuine Poet, has any problem with this. But God botherers and Neurotic nutjobs we will always have with us which is why Literature is, by and large, shite.
For Wendy- a bright kid who got stuck in the Sanskrit ghetto without access to Statistics 101- Hindu theodicy had to be about the admittedly yucky fact that women bleed which is like toootally unfair and Evil coz one isn't allowed to slap Prof Zaehner with one's sanitary napkin though you gotta admit that sure would raise a laugh.
The other thing was Wendy came of age during the Sixties when Club of Rome silliness (endorsed by windbags like Raghavan Iyer) was sodomizing Marcusian silliness and getting it pregnant with a Harvard School of Divinity type phantom child.
This is not to say that Wendy's books are evil. They are menstrual, and menstruation is a good thing- provided you slap Rajiv Malhotra around the chops with your used tampon coz that's always funny. Not that I'm against Malhotra. It's just there's a certain protocol to be observed in dealing with Stephanians.

Ghalib Ghazal 64

If Nakedness is lacking whose hand can Madness lend?

Collar tearing now the Duty my neck to thus bend.

Like the prismatics of burning paper is Restlessness' wizardry
With mirrors myriad the heart binds its own flutter to be free

What claim for departed joy can we press on Heaven's Wheel?

For what the Highwayman carries off, in his debt we yet feel

To extinction allot your essence if for it you are yet eager

The wood chips kindle, make the fire-place not meager.

I am a sacrifice of such style as to my butcher instigate

To such ingenuity in torture both worlds regenerate

junūñ kī dast-gīrī kis se ho gar ho nah ʿuryānī
garebāñ chāk kā ḥaq ho gayā hai merī gardan par

bah rang-e kāġhaż-e ātish-zadah nairang-e betābī
hazār āʾīnah dil bāñdhe hai bāl-e yak tapīdan par

falak se ham ko ʿaish-e raftah kā kyā kyā taqāẓā hai
matāʿ-e burdah ko samjhe huʾe haiñ qarẓ rahzan par

fanā ko sauñp gar mushtāq hai apnī ḥaqīqat kā
furoġh-e t̤ālaʿ-e ḳhāshāk hai mauqūf gulḳhan par

asad bismil hai kis andāz kā qātil se kahtā hai
kih mashq-e nāz kar ḳhūn-e do-ʿālam merī gardan par

A Gedanken re. Jack Bauer & the doctrine of Necessity.

Spoiler alert- the forthcoming Jack Bauer film, like many other Hollywood blockbusters which shameless rip-off yours truly, is based on the following blog post.

Synopsis

Jack Bauer has come to learn that the following propositions are factually correct-
1) Ambassador McFaul will fill his hands with his own feces and fling the said feces at Vladimir Putin at the Sochi Winter Olympics closing ceremony, thus triggering the thermonuclear annihilation of the planet, unless Michelle Obama discontinues her degrading habit of tickling his tummy and remarking 'who's a good boy then?'.
2) Michelle Obama will only stop tickling Ambassador McFaul's tummy and saying 'who's a good boy then?' if Barry takes her to Specsavers.
3) Barry will only take Michelle to Specsavers if, the 'Ethical Genius of Georgetown', the gorgeous, pouting, Prof. Jason Brennan, once again takes on the redoubtable role of 'Debbie dun Dallas Dresner and attempts to extort money from POTUS by pretending to be an attorney representing the website 'How to be Black' and alleges that Barry dun bin channeling Baratunde and owes mega-bucks for Intellectual property rights infringement and so Barry realizes that the only lawyer smart enough to get him off is his wife Michelle but she sorely needs them half moon reading glasses, that Specavers have a discount on, which Juries like totally eat up, provided they are sported by truly epic callipygian hotties like Palanniappan Chidambaram not to mention Kapil Sibal, except I did just mention Kapil Sabil and will have to go away for a bit for a quiet wank.
Meanwhile
Jack Bauer has now cornered Prof Jason Brennan and attempts to reason with him-
Jack- Prof. Brennan, you gotta immediately extort Pres. Barry. Billions of lives are at stake. Please, please, pretty please!
Brennan- Fuck off. Ever since I tried to extort Vivek Iyer- that horrible declasse Tambram piece of shit- I keep having nightmares of that deranged fuckwit lecturing me on the phone about, anti-Mahaffy, Irish Catholic antinomian ethics and shite.
Jack- But, don't you understand, Humanity will be wiped out unless you once again don the wig of Debbie dun Dallas Dresner?'
Brennan- Would that be such a bad thing? At least, that fucker Vivek Iyer will get what's coming to him.
Jack- Vivek will survive! Because he is a miserly little shit, he orders takeout idli-sambar only from the filthiest South Indian eatery in existence! Indeed, he is their only customer! Thus, he has ingested such a huge quantity of cockroach intestines as to have become a cockroach himself! I tell you, he has become the king of the cockroaches- which species, as you well know, will survive the Nuclear holocaust and rule over this planet! Don't you understand! This is all part of Vivek's cunning plan!
Brennan- It is for the best. Humanity is too good for this planet. I have guarded my anal cherry for Ayn Rand, who has a dick in Heaven. Dying to this earth, where I was but a soi disant Bleeding Heart Libertarian, I am reborn to her brusque buggery for, as you know, Ayn only sodomizes virgins for in her Heaven where all revert to that condition of sempeternal sophomorehood such, as it is my proud boast, I alone have sustained all through my career as a Public Intellectual.
Jack- Are you saying, if you were buggered here and now, Ayn would disdain your backside?
Brennan- Yes! Of course! Ayn don't do sloppy seconds. If I were buggered on earth, I'd spend eternity in that Hell described by Doestoevsky, suffering that sorrow that arises from one's inability to be anally Ayn Rand reamed.

Question
Under the Common Law Doctrine of Necessity (Braxton), and keeping in mind that U.S foreign policy is bankrupt, does Jack Bauer have a defense in Law for what he does next?

Dana Gioia- genuine poet or fake Catholic?

He was a smart guy, a nice guy, a good looking guy. He married someone as lovable as himself. They had a child who died.
Many years later he wrote this-

Majority

Now you’d be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you’d be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife. 

 This is a genuine poem- no question. It's actually a great poem though it doesn't concern itself with greatness. It is full of art, without being artful. It has 'ma'ani afrini' - meaning creation- 'mazmun afrini'- theme creation- and, by its fecundly inventive accentual fractal structure, it actually does exhaust its theme, in the proper Baroque manner, thus instantiating a kenosis, and qualifying as a proper Scholastic or Sufi synteresis.

But is it Catholic?

I ask because, clearly, it is a poem and it is a 'guarding of the heart' and both can be Catholic but

reading it

Tears are our Theotokos
(Allamma Prabhu!)

Whose Christ is lost to Geist.

Laodamia deflowering death and the Ulysses' big word

Laodamia deflowered Death, could Catullus die

Or gain Galatea breath from Pygmalion's sigh

The Eye in the Pyramid of Geist's hysteresis

Were Sauron to the Heart's synteresis.

Note-
A friend, who does not wish his comment on the above to appear here, has taken me to task for using an obscure word simply so as to pull off a facile 'June/ Moon' type rhyme.

In my defense, I went to a Catholic School, in Delhi, but didn't attend Catechism classes because I'm Hindu. I honestly didn't know that synteresis is not a commonly used word, at least, amongst Catholics.
I'd previously used it when translating the Sufi concept of 'guarding of the heart' which, I concluded, involved a Herostratic response to Hegel's pyramidal Synthesis.
When I was young, I read a bit of Joyce scholarship- without, of course, understanding a word- which is why it is interesting that my Google search for 'synteresis' yielded this- to wit, Richard Ellman saying-
'..the question that Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the “Circe” episode, itself the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled by his mother’s ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says, “You sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.” Stephen responds eagerly, “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.” She fails to provide it. This passage has been much interpreted. I suggested a dozen years ago that the word known to all men must be love.1 Hugh Kenner has suggested that it is “perhaps” death—a revelation that would hardly require a mother’s ghost to divulge.2Another writer, Thomas Sawyer, in the James Joyce Quarterly, proposes that the word known to all men is “synteresis,” which would seem rather to be the one word unknown to all men.3 Anyway, synteresis, meaning conscience as a guide for conduct, is too cold and moralistic a concept for the excited Stephen to claim such prominence for it.

Gabler has happily recovered a passage that was, it seems, inadvertently left out of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode. When Stephen is talking about Shakespeare’s affection for his granddaughter, he suddenly bethinks himself, in a passage that the typist probably skipped because two closely succeeding paragraphs ended in ellipsis. He says, “Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus….” The rather tortured Latin, which uses the vocabulary of Thomas Aquinas though I have not found in his works the exact passage, means, “Love truly wishes some good to another and therefore we all desire it.” (In Exiles Richard explains love to the skeptical Robert as meaning “to wish someone well,” as in the Italian, “Ti voglio bene.”) In this view Stephen is following his master Dante, who has Virgil say, in Canto XVII of the Purgatorio—that canto in which the meaning of purgatory is set forth—“Neither Creator nor creature, my son, was ever without love…and this you know” (Singleton translation).

Now that we can be certain that the word known to all men is love, we can verify the implications of Stephen’s question. He is asking his mother to confirm, from the vantage point of the dead—for he thinks she may know now—what from the vantage point of the living he has already surmised. Presumably the dead can fathom the “bitter mystery.” (It will be remembered that at the end of A Portrait his mother hopes that he will learn elsewhere what the heart is and what it feels, and Stephen says “Amen” to that.) Stephen is of one mind with Leopold Bloom, who at an equally tense moment in the “Cyclops” episode declares, “But it’s no use…. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.” “What?” says Alf. “Love,” says Bloom. “I mean the opposite of hatred.”

I'm fucking shite, I am. The question I'd ask my Mum is- 'you guarded your heart and gave it only to Daddy even when so supremely giving it to your children and your widowed Mum and brothers and countless others- more and more of them, precisely coz your heart was guarded so strongly for Dad and only Dad. So tell me- what was his password? Did he call you 'Honeybunny' or 'Cuddlebunny'? I NEED TO KNOW that word all other men know- coz they got wives who are Moms to kids who really fuckin' love their parents, even those who, like me, are totally shit.'

What is that word all men know?

I think it's 'Cuddlehoneybunny'. Gonna try it tonight coz I'm going on a date. Nine months from now- who knows?- I might finally put a bullet in the brain of this abortion of a blog.

The God of Dioscorides

Man is a maze of bitter waters, yet abides

A knot tied in contending tides

Briefer than a bubble

Did Eros not trouble.

Qais, Christ

Qais, Christ of the tribe who worship the Sun
Is an infidel, sure, tho' our God be One
Whose Madness might Heaven Delight
Loves Lailah not but Eternal Night.