Songs to Be Sung

Once I was done reading Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe, and before I started reading Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace (which I'm now 200 pages into), I decided to read a novel by Dan Simmons entitled Song of Kali. Published in 1985, Song of Kali was Simmons' first novel. He has since published an array of award-winning novels across the science fiction, mystery, and horror genres. I briefly reviewed Simmons' latest novel, The Terror, over a year ago and his next novel, Drood, is due out in January 2009.

Set in 1977, the story centers on a New Hampshire-based writer named Robert Luczak who has been given an assignment by Harper's magazine to travel to Calcutta and procure the manuscript of an Indian poet named M. Das, thought to have been dead for nearly eight years. The source of the rumor of M. Das' return is a local writer's union in Calcutta. During his trip to Calcutta, Luczak is determined to not only retrieve the manuscript but to confirm that M. Das is the actual author and is still alive.

What ensues upon Luczak's arrival is a harrowing adventure in which the protagonist is propelled into the depths of the Calcuttan underworld, encountering a group known as the Kapalika, a secret society worshipping the Hindu goddess Kali. In Hinduism, Kali is the goddess of time and change, though she is often associated with death and destruction, being the consort of the Hindu god Shiva. It is argued by some that Calcutta itself is named after Kali, Calcutta allegedly being a shortened form of the Bengali word Kalikshetra – "Land of the Goddess." This etymology is contested by numerous scholars.

In any case, by story's end Simmons' protagonist comes to believe that all of Calcutta is infested with Kali's evil and that Das' manuscript was in fact a "birth announcement" of sorts for the malevolent deity. Over and over again, two lines from Das' poem are repeated: "The Age of Kali has begun. The Song of Kali is now sung."

Coincidentally, I was reading Vox Day's blog yesterday wherein he wrote this entry comparing the so-called "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.) with political neoconservatives. The ensuing discussion in the comments, however, concerned the question of whether a Christian belief in God precludes believing in the existence of lesser supernatural beings or deities. In the comments, Day writes:

Christians worship one supreme Creator God. Not only does this worship not conflict with belief in the existence of many lesser gods, but the latter is quite literally Biblical. If Christians did not believe in the existence of other gods, there would be no need to capitalize God.

Now, you can certainly attempt to get pedantic, but you'll lose. You'll soon find yourself attempting to deny that what is by any atheist definition "a god" is not "a god".

That's a good point, and it is also worth noting that Satan is often referred to as the prince or god of this world. If Satan can exist, why not Kali?

Then again, evil has been a part of the human condition for time immemorial and there are no shortage of communities in the world that may seem more iniquitous than others. For example, I've often felt that way about the city of Laredo, Texas, my birthplace. I was born in Laredo back in 1975, but moved away a few months later. I did not return to live there until 1988, when I was thirteen years of age. I moved away in 1993 once I graduated from high school.

I never could adjust to the culture of the city while I lived there, despite the fact that I'm a direct descendant of the man who founded the city in 1755: Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Garza. It's an odd thing to be an outsider in a city founded by one's own family, but with a poor command of Spanish, an outsider I was. My low opinion of the city hasn't been helped by the surge in violence along the border during the past several years.

Back in 2005 - at Thanksgiving - I went down there to house-sit for my parents who were vacationing in Spain. On Thanksgiving evening, while sitting on the back porch reading a Ted Bell novel (Assassin, I think) and smoking a cigar, I heard six gunshots fired, followed by the squealing of tires. Minutes later, I heard the sirens of approaching police cars and ambulances. Given that this was in an upper middle-class suburb, such incidents are not common and I was quite taken aback. The shooting was not reported in the newspapers the following day, nor was it mentioned on local television.

But of course, in the temporal world there is much good to go along with the bad. As Simmons reminds his readers at novel's end:

The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows.

But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.