Each history consists of sentences and each sentence has a period at the end of it and after each period there is silence.  To know history, one must know not only what the words in the sentences mean, but also what inhabits the silence at each sentence's conclusion.  Sharankumar Limbale, a dalit author from Maharashtra, wrote about his grandmother's sufferings, "Santamai's tears were like an epic."  He found poetry where others might not even find a vocabulary.

 
Iron-willed, even asleep I crave the normal.
No bad dreams for me.
Morning: I wake up, having slept like a baby, and walk into the yard.

Go on your way.  
The evening raises its white baton above the pedestrians.
The cattle’s horns in the abundant evenings sow terror on the boulevard.
Go on your way.  
Now is the shining convoluted coil of the hour.  
A death struggle.  The referee counts 70 . . .
   
Go on your way,” the French surrealist Robert Desnos directs at the beginning of the above quote from his poem “Rencontre” (“Meeting”).
        
But where does one “go on” to?

The language of war is an exercise in pacification. What is pacified is the mind, one's sense of reality. "Collateral damage" is more than a phrase that cloaks the slaughter of civilians.  It is an example of self-help raised to the highest level: why be held back by reality when, by allowing your thinking powers to get killed by friendly fire, you can diminish your stress and improve your chances in life, pursuing your goals without  any longer being distracted by the inconvenience of having to wrestle with society's rights and wrongs.  

Each of the four pieces below meditate in one way or another on the unburials theme which, even when it's not the apparent subject of a particular piece of my writing, governs ny overall approach to the issues of art and literature.