Poetry Books
By
Kritya publication
See the link
|
| |
|
|
 |
The Poet and the Pariah
I am honoured to be among the poets from all over the globe and
feel privileged that I should be asked to inaugurate this august
meet. I am perhaps the most unqualified person for this
prestigious job. I am no poet. I did try to be one when I was
young and full of illusions about myself. But I soon realized,
much to my distress and much to the relief of others, that I did
not possess the gift. I was not touched by Grace on my
shoulders. I called on Poetry, but it did not call on me. One
realizes with a heavy heart soon enough in life that you cannot
choose the drums you want to listen to. They choose you. I have
often felt from within that you cannot choose a medium, the
medium chooses you. You are but an instrument.
This convention is centered on the poetry of exile, the poetry
of diaspora. With increasing mobility, being physically uprooted
from one’s familiar environment is becoming a common experience.
In the globalized world, which is shrinking day by day, we see
people of diverse natures and nationalities thrown together,
their ties from their physical as well as spiritual landscape
snapped, and rootlessness as the only common feature among them.
The world is one, but one in nullity. It is a sad picture. But I
do not think it is such a modern phenomenon, although it is
being much talked about today. We all leave our home at one
point of our lives or another and then spend the rest of our
lives trying to go back to it. It is a fundamental human
experience. It happens all the time. It happened yesterday, it
is happening today and it will happen in future. There is no
escape for Man from this essentially human predicament; if being
exiled is seen and understood as not only a physical reality,
but also a spiritual and emotional phenomenon. One can be in the
midst of one’s loved ones and yet may experience the angst of
being alone, of being exiled, of being alienated. Many times
whole societies, for a variety of reasons, political exigency
being one of them, are torn away from their physical and
spiritual moorings. Individuals as well as societies do not
recover from this trauma for centuries, and by blinding and
deafening themselves by the cacophony of material concerns, by
using the anodynes of material possessions, they try to benumb
the pain of this soul-killing void which is within and without.
It is only a poet who becomes aware of it. And he rebels against
it.
The poet, perhaps, is more susceptible to this fundamental truth
about human existence than anybody else. There is no time in the
known history of humanity, no century when the poet has not
cried out in agony and anger about being an exile. The poet and
the prophet, both are initially and universally rejected by the
people around them and are enshrined by the same people only
when they have sacrificed their lives at the altar of truth. The
poet, like the prophet, is incapable of ignoring the truth. He
is condemned to see it, live it and talk about it. He has no
choice. He refuses to seek shelter from the blinding sun of
truth and the dark night of the soul into the citadels of
conventional norms, the security of conformism, the illusion of
having lived life by being determinedly festive in shallow
pursuits and by clinging to his molded beliefs. This is
considered an anomaly, a deviation or an aberration by people
around him and for that he must be punished, must be banished.
He cries out in agony, much to the distress of the Lotus Eaters
and pays for it by being an exile and an outcast. He is alone in
the cosmic wilderness, ‘a community of one’. It is his vocation
to go to the bitter roots of truth and he must pay for it. In
trying to discover these roots, he aspires to expand the
consciousness of humanity, a much dreaded thing for small men.
But only the poet knows that any direct and fervid communication
between two brothers, a true link with humanity, is possible
only in the naked light of truthfulness. He is in dire need of
connectedness in his expanded awareness and remains the most
unconnected. He loves the world and gets shunned in return as if
he is plague. He is called a madman, a threat, a pariah because
he has decided to drink at the fountains of bitter Truth. He
loves the whole world as his home and yet he does not belong.
Loneliness is a terrible thing and a poet is perhaps the
loneliest of all human beings. Yet he knows how to transform it
into freedom, into visionary creation. Writing a poem or
creating any Art is an offering made in love, a sacrificial act
performed in utter humility. To surrender thus requires great
spiritual strength. Only a poet has the spiritual strength to
lay bare his vulnerabilities (or does he get this strength
because he lays himself so bare, so vulnerable?) because he has
decided to put total trust in his fellow beings. And he is
almost never reciprocated, is in fact often jilted. Yet to love
is his religion and the eternal fire of the universe keeps
burning within him unflinchingly.
Language is his only tool, his only instrument with which he
tries to bond himself with humanity. It was always so and still
is to a certain extent. But in the changing world, technology is
God and when this Modern God is in a rude and aggressive hurry
to depose the poet, I shudder to even imagine what the poet’s
fate will be. With the threat of nuclear destruction looming
over their heads, people will never trust each other again. With
the loss of trust, Language acquires duplicity. Communication
and language collapse and in a world where people, afraid of
getting hurt, guard their individuality ferociously with
unrelenting determination, ‘Word’ has become suspect. It is also
an exhausted, overused instrument, often inadequate in
expressing what is basically ineffable, indefinable and beyond
the compass of intellect. That is perhaps why we see a radical
reduction of means in his art—Emily Dickinson and Beckett come
easily to my mind—a sort of minimalism. Is it a journey into a
resonant silence, an enriching emptiness? It is a paradox that a
poet has to employ word to express this silence. Where language
is suspect, a poet has to apply himself to the purification and
abbreviation of language. He tries to deconstruct and
reconstruct it by removing the historically accumulated meanings
acquired by it. He may even withdraw into silence when language
fails him. But his silence is more vocal than his words. The
dashes in Emily’s poems are full of explosive silences and a
play like ‘Sigh’ remains an ultimate and desperate whimper of an
artist. Unable to establish communication, thrown aside as an
outcast, the poet perhaps seeks company in himself.
The soul selects her own society—
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
(Emily Dickinson)
The extremity of this journey into the silence is often
indicated by the artist’s act of renouncing his art. Emily never
published her poems, Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at eighteen,
Artaud withdrew into madness and Van Gogh put a bullet through
his head.
Does it mean that the poet is shutting himself in a private
cocoon? Does it mean he is failing in his vocation by getting
crushed by the demands that his vocation makes on him? The poet
has tried to reach us. Always .But what have we done to reach
him? It is to our peril if we do not make an effort to connect
with him and share his silence. He is in possession of an elixir
only which can help us trudge this desert of alienation. He
seems to be in communion with a higher reality, in possession of
an otherworldly truth and he stands there in his resplendent
aloneness as an emissary from another world. He speaks of the
unknown and we are terrified of it. As long as this situation
prevails, there is no real togetherness, no bonding. If it
persists, there is only doom. It is not easy to surrender to
him. It involves too many risks; the risk of obliterating
ourselves and merging into something that is bigger than us.
I would like to quote a few lines which are an inscription on an
ancient temple. They say it all.
Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight.
Mahesh Elkunchwar
|
|
|
|
