man lion man lion man lion there's a man lion coming out of the f-ing walls.
on being terrified and using it and other notes from Vedic Chanting
I’ve been singing the Narasiṃha Kavacam for the last week. I’m terrible at it. I plan on doing it for forty days straight. G asked what I’m doing.
Well, I said, there’s a man lion. He’s coming out of the walls. He eats a guys guts out.
G lifted his eyes. For the past several days, when he asks what I’ve been doing with myself, I sing out ‘man lion man lion man lion’ like a teeny bopper love song. He chimes in ‘please don’t eat me when you’re coming out the walls’.
And so we get on. We get on between conversations about how short the money seems to be these days, and the agony of gunshots, and my wanting to poke out my eyes because of the sleazy sexual predators carrying national news and politics. Oh and running supreme courts. We get on, raking the yard and bagging the winter’s deadfall.
Man lion man lion man lion.
I am working on a piece about writing letters. I’ve also been writing scribbles for students. My editor slaps my hand when I do this. She calls it “leaking”. Don’t leak, she says. Meaning: the time I spend writing up workbooks and songbooks for students directly takes away from the time and energy I have for ‘my work’. I agree. I know this is true. I both love writing things for students and hate it. I haven’t written here because of it. I’m deciding just to riff and hit publish here today because why the hell not. Perfectionism and capitalism and women’s work are all themes in the background.
Man. Lion.
Here’s the story. If you sing to the man lion, if you really come to love him and adore him, god will come out of your very walls. God will break out of the sticks and bricks and arches panting with righteous vengeance. He’ll come fighting against religious hypocrisy and upholding the Way. Narasiṃha is the story of hope in the midst of impossible odds. Hope against hopelessness.
I’m not making this up.
He’s everywhere. The child says: He is in the pillars. He is in the smallest twig.
Once upon a time, there was a battle between righteousness and not so much so. Viṣṇu being righteousness. Viṣṇu is always righteousness showing up in the world. Hiraṇyaksa being the not so much so. Viṣṇu - he who shows up in the world, the immanent divine - wins.
Hiraṇayakaśipu, brother of the felled demon, spits and mutters a bunch of cloying, vitriolic, hateful and resentful things. To the effect of I hate that guy, meaning Viṣṇu, meaning right. Forever.
The story goes on. Brother of the felled demon nursed his resentment for so many freaking years that he became terribly powerful with it.
That’s half of the story here, the always story. The demons are hella strong. They are hella strong because they are adept yogis. Yoga - in an of itself - is not righteous. Yoga is just a bunch of stuff that will clarify and make you potent. Yoga is just what you put your mind on - the layering of mind. You put your mind on resentment for decades and you will become a living, pulsing, ready to go off weapon. You will become a monster. You will be masterful, powerful, frightening. So: the dude’s strong. He has used yoga and meditation for so long he is graced with a ‘boon’.
What can I give you, Brahma says to him.
I want immortality, resentful smoking demon says.
Brahma scratches behind his ear and looks off at the horizon. Looks back at smoking demon who’s nostrils are red with the dragon smoke, burned off like. Thing is, Brahma said, You can’t have immortality. That’s not possible. Sorry, bud. He bends over and picks up a little stick. Stands back upright and leans back into the wall, peeling the stick and meeting demon’s eyes: choose something else.
Demon’s eyes are red rimmed. all that decades of sick hot smoke in them. They do not narrow. They get bigger and bigger.
Make it so that I can’t be killed. Not by a man. Not by a beast. Not in the day. Not at night. Not by hand; not by a weapon. Make it so that I will not be killed in the air or on the ground, neither in nor outside. Give me that.
Brahma runs his fingers over the smooth stick and studies it before he flicks it aside and stands back up. Alright. It is so.
I imagine some cosmic cracking. Brimstone. Dark, dark sky. In my version, demon leers.
And the story goes on for many years, with Demon seemingly unstoppable and ruining everything.
And then he has a kid.
This kid loves. He loves right over wrong. He loves hard. He loves simple. He calls daddy demon out, but even that with love. Daddy demon is a frail, pissy, vengeful god though. He doesn’t do well with being called out. He roars and thumps his chest. He hates the fact that even though he runs the whole world, even though everything on earth is in his power, even though everyone is terrified of him and cowers out of his way, his kid up and does something different.
Where did you learn this?! He hot whispers in the kid’s face.
I can’t help it, kid says. Kid shrugs.
Demon god rages, knocks over a table. He sends the kid to boarding school. One of those schools that has banned books. After seven years, the kid comes home. Tall. Boney. Lose jointed. In the smoldering great hall, Daddy Demon kicks back in his divan and lifts his lip like Elvis. Well, kid? Who’s your daddy?
The nerve. The brightness. The bold kiddo says he loves Viṣṇu. He has always loved Viṣṇu. He has decided what he wants to do with his life….
Imagine the howling. Daddy demon screams as he leaps up off the divan and towers over kiddo. It’s noisy. Then it’s silent. Dishes are broken, wine drips off the table on the stone floor, a last goblet spins slow. You can hear nothing except the demon breathing.
Who taught you this? He sputters. Where did you learn this? He says.
Righteousness is in me, answers the kid, shrugging. It’s who I am. It’s in you, too, dad. Dad, now, is bristling and salivating. It’s everywhere, dad. It’s in the very walls.
This is the point at which Daddy demon absolutely loses his shit. He is going to kill his own kid. All the servants have fled. Birds flit away. Pets - peacocks, elephants, tigers - scatter. Even administrators and leaders of the army cower.
But as Daddy gets taller and taller, bigger and meaner, awful to smell, you know who comes out of the walls? You know who shows up to protect the kid?
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Back to our story. That’s right, folks: god comes out of the walls to protect his devotee. The pillars break. The palace walls collapse, which lifts the ground and darkens the air for a really long time. Moiling, smokey air and dusty air from the crumbled foundation.
He isn’t a man. And he isn’t a beast. He’s a man lion. God is going to overcome evil, despite all evil’s powers and special privileges and boons and graft and clout. If he can’t be killed by man or beast, righteousness will show up as a transcreature more disturbing and frightening and weirdly gorgeous than anything ever seen before.
That’s right, kiddos: justice wins by working it’s way through the stipulations, against impossible outcomes. He lifts demon daddy up like a rag doll. He drags him - stunned and kicking and both bewildered and terrified - to the threshold. You get it, don’t you? It’s dusk: neither day nor night. Narasiṃha (man lion) sits on the threshold (neither in nor out) and puts demon daddy on his lap (not on ground nor in the air) and Man Lion god evicerates, disembowels, and kills the now rather puny looking demon king with his claws. Claws are neither hand nor weapon, technically.
Man lion man lion man lion I go singing. I look at the wall as I sing it.
Don’t eat me as you come out the walls, G sings from the hallway. Which is not to say G should be afraid. Just that he doesn’t know the story.
In the end, which is never the end, the kid (Prahlāda, sorry I neglected to tell you his name) is safe. But now man lion is here, and he’s bloody and panting and rather dangerous. His vengeance is a threat.
I was out doing yard work. Pissy, vengeful. I tore at the weeds. A scaggey one bit me but I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice until a passing kid said hey lady, you’re bleeding. I looked. I was.
Prahlāda soothes Narasiṃha with songs. And through Prahlāda’s singing, the terrifying, dangerous, man lion form of Viṣṇu (Ugra Narasiṃha - angry man lion) becomes the serene man lion form of Viṣṇu (Shant Narasiṃha).
There is another sequence to this story in which man lion is embraced by Lakshmi. But that’s a later story.
Now, back to a word from our sponsors:
music. smiling children. a call to ban the guns.