"Pluto Shits on the Universe ": A glimpse into Chaos with Fatimah Asghar and Hakim Bey
‘I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can / chart me'
There’s something about a reckless, rollicking jaunt of a poem that tugs at a lever in the gut. You know that feeling? the one where your back upstings, and the spine shivers like a ticklish snake, before straightening. A morsel of the shadow self erupts from your breast. You laugh.
There is an energy that lives in the diminutive speck, an element of irk buried in the seed; scribbled code. An itch with many names. Call it the gadfly, or chaos or the anarchistic fire. The speck that lives on the border is always watching, waiting patiently for the moment to catapult out of syllabus. Unpredictability is its skein. In a world turned inside out, with every movement graphed, the lick of chaos is catastrophic. Fatimah Asghar’s playful dramatic monologue riffs into an irreverent guffaw in this vein, channelling the planet Pluto, in a mock-badass middle finger to the nous of our familiar universe. The epigraph to ‘Pluto shits on the Universe’ reads:
On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.
This poem was shared by a netizen in response to a twitter ask - ‘poems that will make me laugh’ - joyfully exceeding its intended purpose. It made me think of chaos. The obvious sociality of the metaphor apart, I thought of how chaos as a discursive and aesthetic form is embedded deep in our modes of existence. I turn to Hakim Bey, who has argued ways of reading chaos into historical communities, what he calls ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ). His notion of ‘pirate utopias’ is quite fascinating as a defiant architecture of agitation.
CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.
Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
- From ‘Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism’, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
I have written before about the effect Hakim Bey has had on my thinking, and the affective force of his ideas. His conception of the revelatory power of freedom, its anti-establishment flares and artistic contours is a philosophy of disruption that feels entirely natural. A planet’s disruption of orbit echoes down the well of our meaning making in a dismissive refusal to name. Pluto is the gadfly, the jailed fact checker, the protestor, and the poet. Pluto is the boy running through the paddy fields towards the rain. ‘I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can / chart me. All the other planets, they think / I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped / moon, running free.’
“I chaos like a motherfucker”.
Asghar’s poetry is this tangent, this chaos thrust right into the sanitised pages of political identities. Using the language of framing that is the essential shadow of the academy, images break ranks, histories sidle in and out of the rectangular box. "What to do then, when the only history you have is collage?”, she asks in Super Orphan.
Drawing faultlines through socially constructed dreams served to dull the creative mind, Asghar’s ouevre stains with a plumage of narrative miasmas.
An arc of resistance can be captured as a movement - in language, in agitation and in the flowering of self and community. Its poetry is the rush of the surging wave, a deafening apocalypse.
A couple of other shares to compensate for the hiatus:
Finding Nainsukh - A series of poems that I wrote as companion pieces to Amit Dutta’s film Nainsukh as part of ASAP connect’s ‘Fiction’ section where text stands alongside, and in response to, visual art. You should also check out the other poetry in this delightful project including Kunjana Parashar’s Night Shift Poems.
3 poems of mine on food in On Eating’s Poetry Special Issue
If the poetry and the commentary resonate with you, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
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Note: Those, not in India, who’d like to support the work I do at Poetly, do write to me - poetly@pm.me. (Apologies, I will figure out international payments soon)
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