[ ]: Archeologies of the Ether, Affective Matrices, and Spi/ritual Technologies of Care

Abstract

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to trace a being that makes a longing into belonging. This dissertation presents my current philosophical understandings and queries, which serve to inform my creative works in music and language. In the introduction, I approach the word “portfolio” to mean ‘carrying leaves,’ and address three kinds of ‘leaves’ that have informed my work, namely: the South Indian banana leaf upon we each to ponder through aesthetic consumption and production (polymorphic grammar), the leaving that occurs during pilgrimage to think of literal and aesthetic mobility (polydirectional pilgrimaging) and palm-leaf books bound by thread to think through non-linearity of time (polychronic narrative). Throughout the dissertation, I argue for a sense of valuing the local in all these spheres (incorporating colloquial and contemporary grammars into compositions, tending to the physical local in our practices, and observing the temporal local as a site of inspiration, respectively). In the first two chapters that follow, I return to the first sociomusical grammar that formed my practice, that of the vārakari sampradāya, a pilgrimage tradition where its exponents would sing abhang-s, or “songs without end” while walking towards a temple. I critically intervene in (my own historicization of) the particular strain of the vārakari sampradaya I practiced in South India— one I refer to as the yāttirikar sampradāya— by utilizing the grammar of academic writing (“Chapter 1: Yattirikar Sampradāyam”). In the next chapter, I critically intervene in (my own relationship to) academic written form by introducing principles of harikathā grammar into it (“Chapter 2: Towards a Musicoanagogical Methodology”).The dissertation experiments with academic form by introducing elements of harikathā, the larger of South Asian exegetic framework that the vārakari sampradāya operates within, where practitioners sing songs and tell each other stories (kathā) of the divine (hari). Finally, to address the creative practice component of the program, this dissertation contains in-depth detail of three recent works (namely: Daughter of a Temple, The Body of Reality, and Nine Jewelled Deer) in the final segment (“Chapter 3: Portare Foglio: The Leaves We Carry”).