Trinity

The Christian trinity of Truth, Beauty, Good is translated into the western discourse as the threefold human enquiry into Knowledge, Ethics and Aesthetics. Of course, the implicit assumtion is that knowledge seeks 'truth' through reason, ethics is geared towards finding the 'good', and aesthetics concerns the enchantment with 'beauty'-- pure and sublime. For a long while, infact, the mind was perceived to have specialised activities of three different kinds. The tale goes at least as far back as Plato who postulates the tri-partite division of the soul, viz. wisdom, passion or appetite and temperance.

Such neat, isolated, sovereign divisions, of course, might have appealed to some at the dawn of modern Enlightenment. But the fact that it necessarily must be so is soon questioned seriously.

In fact to take a look at the Indian, more specifically the Vedic, conception, while there appears a striking semblance in its formulation of the Sat-Cit-Ananda, one must note the inherent relationship between all three concepts, roughly rendered as Being/Truth-Force-Bliss. The very idea of one existing without the other is absurd. Moreover, it is really as ananda that the reality is manifest, in its completeness. Two of the most riveting visualizations of such a blissful world are perhaps: one, the image of Vishnu lying in absolute serenity in the Ocean of Milk, and two, the idea of Rasa Lila of Krishna with the gopis, offering a cosmic glimpse of ananda as in divine symphony. The 'aesthetic' then, seems to be an instrument of knowledge proper in some sense. It can reach out to being as well.

Clipping

A View of Greece

'The Athenians numbered only 70,000, but their philosophy, architecture and mathematics continue to influence Western Society today. '

Asian Age
29.12.1997

The surf breaks over
The looming cliff
Seagulls
dive through white misty air
laden with a salty softness
Sepia tinted pictures
of brightly painted clay toys
Of ancient coins of copper
tucked away somewhere
Of the champa tree
A whiff of cream yellow scent
runs in hurriedly
Eliot carves the Wasteland
Vladimir with his friend waits for Godot
The absurd beomes the normal
Cogito Ergo Sum.

But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk 'nonsense'.

Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations

Heraclitus of the Pre-Socratic Greece is best known for his famous 'paradoxical' quip: 'You can't step into the same river twice'. For Heraclitus the most real was a 'being' that was ceaselessly 'becoming'. The only thing, real and true, was change itself. Nothing was static, nothing remained stagnant. The cosmos was compared to a strung lyre or a stretched bow, constantly in a state of opposed forces, of dynamism, motion and war. For him, it was power, force or energy that overarched the true order of things, not simply matter.

There is a similar interesting paradox in the poetry of Basho, the Japanese Zen Buddhist of 17th century. He wrote Haiku poetry, of the evocative 3-line, 17 syllable form that resonates in the ear with dramatic rhythm. Following is an example:

I

An ancient temple pond: jump of a frog; the sound of water.

II

A solitary crow on a bare bough; evening in autumn.

III

Wild seas tonight; past Sado island stretches; The River of Heaven.

Basho's poetry too reflects that being or reality, calm and eternal, can contain things that are ephemeral, isolated and many. It is the interesting interplay of what appears as tranquil and permanent, and what jumps, of a sudden, at one - as the unexpected, ushering what is the unpredictably novel .

the brook

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through the Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent: The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

Two Rivers : R.W. Emerson

Venetian Blues

Van-Gogh's classic

Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers

A God's Labour


I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jeweled dreams of you.

I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity....

Sri Aurobindo

IMPLOSION

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedlebee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so,
it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll

A sense of finality ironically looms over the postmodern suburban dwelling – the chaotic mélange of difference, paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, instability and cynicism. In its irregular, episodic, haphazard habitat, the subject confronts the existential angst, the dilemma of choice. Amid this, the idea of breaking free is captivating indeed, as one conjures images of Jonathon Livingston Seagull soar higher, exploring the vast blue expanse – and its own consciousness. Is it possible to assume that the ultimate power lies within one’s own reach that is in consciousness; and the road to freedom waiting to be taken? Tweedlebee’s logic might refer to the mundane; and yet aren’t we free in postulating a ‘logic of the infinite’- invoking, in essence, Kierkegaard’s ‘passion for the possible’ as we imagine ourselves clung to a giant pendulum oscillating between what is given and what is possible, between the present and the absent (perhaps the future)?

Song of the Bird

Where we jostle
Through the harassing crowd
In pursuit of
An El Dorado
Of deep hidden dreams
Latent wishes
Toil
Under the fiery sun
Sweating, suffocating,
Where we lose count of hours spent
Before the machine
One that rumbles
Other programmed
Where the flow of creativity
Seems obstinately,
Even, helplessly plugged.
Amidst cold wintry fog
Shivering, chilling
In mindless frenzy
We play the game
Thrust upon us
And which we invent too.
Where bereft of
That streak of spontaneity
We continue
To meander through the maze.
When …in a subtle
Moment of metamorphosis
In the twilight glow
And clusters of bloom
We hear -
The song of the bird.
It is then we discover
the stark contrast –
The melody of freedom and growth
And the lives of ours – stunted
Utter bonsais.

Problematizing 'Contemporary' Poetry

To begin with, ‘What is Contemporary Poetry?’ As is evident, there seems to be a certain shift in the way poets start writing poems by the end of the two World Wars. This period seems to usher in hope, yet despair, a tone of defiance, non conformity, a ‘poetry of protest’ and escape. In the post colonial situation, the subject’s search for identity, ‘language, subalternity and generally questions of gender, desire, and sexuality acquire greater relevance than ever.

In his Preface to ‘An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry’ Makarand Paranjape writes, “… Modernism is dead … Modernism in Indian English poetry with its notion of a literary avant-garde, its emotional restraint and repression … its belief in the image as the supreme poetic device, its aloofness and alienation from India, its secular dogmatism, its outright rejection of the past, and above all, its arrogant narcissism and self-absorption is thankfully, now passé.” About the “new” poets he claims, “There is no anxiety to conform to any one central idea about their identity or cultural praxis. In this sense, these poets are post modern: they celebrate not conformity but ‘difference’, whether of language, region, nationality, politics, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.”

In ‘An Introduction’ Kamala Das explores her identity:

‘I am an Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one.
Don’t write English, they said,
English is not your mother tongue…’

Again, Nissim Ezekiel’s lines from the ‘Latter-Day Psalms’:

“The images are beautiful birds
and colourful fish: they fly,
they swim in my Jewish consciousness.”

I wonder if there is any singular tone, any uniform voice that can be immediately identified as the ‘contemporary’. Secondly, how long would ‘contemporary’- continue as a slogan? In other words, doesn’t the ‘contemporary’ ever lose relevance and import? What to call what succeeds temporally, or follows the ‘contemporary’? Are we under some sort of a tyranny of the contemporary?

The next concern is the interpretation of contemporary Poetry. How to read a poem? This is apparently a certainly valid question. This is because there is a way (not necessarily one, though) of reading a poem. If that question did not occur at all, we would merely be happy reading poetry to each other, rather than reading papers, criticisms and debates on poetry. Almost immediately this suggests that theorizing or the conscious formulation and articulation of interpretation was somehow more important. But whether that necessarily must be so, is a question that needs equal attention.

The usual theoretical assumption, therefore, is that poetry has purpose and it is to be understood and appreciated in its situation in specific contexts. The role of aesthetic delight, the experience of beauty and rasa in contemporary poetry seems to be fairly unclear.

Going by such argument, more than the lines, it is the subtext that is more important -- what matter are the unsaid, the blanks. When the subtexts are to be reconstructed, there is naturally a way of doing it. Inevitably we become obsessed with interpretation. For instance, when I read the poem -- the post modern way, tentatively I read into it a rejection of grand narratives, defiance against institutionalized power, even State, patriarchal hegemony, etc. The sublime, eternal, perennial concept of beauty and truth is brought under attack. A ‘system of difference’ is sought to be recreated and the inherent relativism owing to cultural and historical dimensions is made explicit.

Here are certain observations. First, the very idea of putting forth a case for a feminist reading of poetry or the Dalitization of poetry, the Black perspective, as such involves a strong sense of politics. More importantly, the defense of the marginalized acutely appeals to the emotional. To question stereotypes, interrogating territorial compulsions, institutions, historical events and processes such as colonialism is really out of an ethical urgency which automatically presupposes the freedom of choice.

However much we wish, an epistemological enquiry into ‘What the poem says’ is infact not a free standing, neutral, a moral question. The answer shall necessarily be a matter of an emotional and ethical preference.

Again, as we do post modernist readings over and over again, is it not just the reversal of the binary opposition? If it is, then there is still a deliberate, a conscious act of privileging. Privileging the marginalized but privileging all the same, and creating inverted power structures in the process. The argument of ‘difference’ has altered our perspectives, but it should not be stretched beyond the point of being counter productive.

Looking at the interpretation of interpretations, Zygmunt Bauman in ‘Hermeneutics and Social Sciences’ points out, “The hermeneutics at a point of time saw ‘understanding’ as residing in a sort of ‘spiritual unification’ of the writer and the reader. It was an interaction…” Thus, when I read a poem, I contribute to its meaning. I think that also needs to be borne in mind.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Roland Barthes resisted the absolute control of the author over ‘meaning’. He famously proclaimed, “The author is dead”. As he himself asserts in his work ‘The Death of the Author’-- “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing…”

For Foucault, in contrast, the poem cannot be read in isolation of the person who produced it – the archaeology (i.e. the process of working through the historical archives of various societies to bring to light the discursive formations and events that have produced the fields of knowledge and discursive formations of different historical periods) is extremely important in contextualizing and interpreting the text.

For Derrida still, the text or the poem being situated in a language remains in a state of production. Its meaning is in a state of infinite play. The poem can have multiple meanings. It can, in fact, be doubted as to whether a poet can communicate a fixed thought to the reader through her text (the poem) at all. One can bring R. Sundararajan’s reminder, in ‘Studies in Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Deconstruction’, ‘Derrida himself has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that this endless play of the signifiers…may be looked upon as the expression of the productivity of language’. It is not a matter of despondent anxiety. It is rather the articulation of the fecundity of the word and expression of an inherent freedom that drives the creative realm of language and thought.

Let us open the doors, then! I think there is a need to be cautious of the normative call and function of ‘interpretation’ – ‘this-is-how-you-should-read-it’. This is because it has the penchant for slipping into a distorted version, more pedagogical refrain – of ‘this-is-how-you-must-read-it’. Thankfully, for now, this seems to be a remote option.

Therefore, meanwhile, let us keep reading poems anyway:

‘Say it is a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea...’

E.Y. Harburg