The Delhi Division by Michael Moorcock

 

The Delhi Division - second of eleven tales in The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius.

Jerry, the Eternal Champion, entered the land of Shiva-Shakti, drove his Phantom V down twisting lanes in a smoky Indian rain and it's "difficult to see through the haze that softened the landscape. In rain, the world becomes timeless.
Jerry switched on his music, singing along with Jimi Hendrix as he swung around the corners."

Good thinking, Jerry! Sing along with Jimi, very much like a devotee chanting mantra, link your own, very personal voice with the rocker who portrayed himself as the Hindu deity Vishnu. Anchoring yourself via sound, as if practicing nada yoga - just what the Indian sages and rishis call for when time is measured in cycles of billions of years. Remember what Professor Hira told you about kalpa and Kali Yuga.



Jerry arrived at his destination, his big wooden bungalow in Simla, in the far northern reaches of India, just to the west of Tibet. As Cornelius the Champion walked through the rain to the veranda, "he listened to the sound of the water on the leaves of the trees, like the ticking of a thousand watches.
He had come home to Simla and he was moved."

So ends the first of sixteen micro-chapters of Delhi Division, an ending featuring the sound of a thousand watches ticking, bestowing expanded, richer, deeper meaning to time and eternity for our Eternal Champion.

What brings Jerry C to India, pray tell? Answer: to take on the role of English assassin. And speaking of English assassin, with its narrative quick shifts, its insertions of news clips, its prodding readers to fill in the gaps and also a mention of the SS Kao An, The Delhi Division gives us a foretaste of The English Assassin, Book Three of The Cornelius Quartet.

A batch of Delhi Division highlights and questions:

Lord Shiva In Action
Jerry has a blown-up picture of Alan Powys (victim of LSD gas in The Final Programme), a 1952 copy of Vogue, a Captain Marvel comic book (nice touch, Michael Moorcock!), a pack of Pall Mall faded to a barely recognizable pink. No doubt about it, no matter where you look, Shiva's destructive power is made manifest. No wonder Jer mulls over "what was the exact difference between synthesis and sensationalism?" 

Jerry, forever the artist and aesthete, that's synthesis as in unifying various art forms into an aesthetic whole, a creation that's more than the sum of its parts. As for sensationalism, Jerry wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than the extremely controversial and attention-grabbing, in a word, being sensational.

Come on, Jerry, you can do both at the same time as you balance order and chaos. All in a day's work for an Eternal Champion.

Vishnu/Jerry, Sustainer of Life
"Jerry stayed in for the rest of the afternoon, oiling his needle rifle. Aggression sustained life, he thought. It had to be so; there were many simpler ways of procreating.
Was this why his son had died before he was born?"

Sounds like a Zen koan we are being asked to unpack. Is Jerry's needle rifle a means to maintaining cosmic balance between procreation and death? Should we see Jerry's son as symbolizing his unquenchable sexual yearning?

Classic Flight
Jerry travels south via Tiger Moth biplane, sporting an old-fashioned leather helmet and goggles. Fans will recall Jerry widemouthed while wearing a leather helmet and goggles in a drawing by Romain Slocombe during a future adventure in The Entropy Tango. 



Needle Rifle
"Jerry sighted and titled the rifle a little. He pulled the trigger and sent a needle up through the priest's open mouth and into his brain." Does this JC zap serve as a statement relating to Western conquest and colonization? And what happens further south following a crash landing (bummer) of his biplane, when Jer has an opportunity to kill the Pakistani he's hired to assassinate?

Stunning Sabiha
Back at his bungalow, Jerry opens a brass box and hold it out to Sabiha. She takes what she needs. One of the more provocative scenes in the tale. What is Jerry offering Sabiha? Can we imagine the stunningly beautiful Pakistani film actress Sabiha Khanum as the story's Sabiha?



From the Material to the Spiritual
Was Jerry hired to assassinate Sabiha's lover, a Pakistani, because he wasn't Hindu? And please keep in mind, there is an actual Delhi Division that's a subdivision of Indian Railways, a railroad as active today as it was back in 1968 when this story was written. Is Michael Moorcock drawing an analogy between the Industrial Divisions of regional railways and the Spiritual Division between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims?

Nāmarūpa
Listening to Jimi Hendrix's "Waterfall," our Eternal Champion performed something most quizzical: "Jerry reached down from the table and touched a stud in the floor. The hut disappeared. Jerry took a deep breath and felt much better."

What are we to make of this? Has Jerry reached a level of enlightenment where he has transcended nāma (name) and rūpa (form)?

I urge you to read this tale sooner rather than later and judge for yourself.


British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939

"The ghost of his unborn son haunted him; though here, in the cool bungalow with its shadowed passages, it was much easier to bear. Of course, it had never been particularly hard to ignore; really a different process altogether. The division between imagination and spirit had not begun to manifest itself until quite late, at about the age of six or seven. Imagination - usually displayed at that age in quite ordinary childish games - had twice led him close to a lethal accident. In escaping, as always, he had almost run over a cliff." -- Michael Moorcock, The Delhi Division