Poetry Matters
SHARMILA RAY
Poetry creates an atmosphere of words and words only, biting, caustic, lulling, loving. The words get blurred, but it leaves me contemplating, a bit like in what Tocqueville calls touching the ‘hidden nerve’. I get transported to a universe which is expansive, spontaneous, artless and also self-indulgent. So it is not surprising that I wish to tackle one of the most less talked about but intensely engaged and argued topic that is poetry. I am not going into the dusty, distancing powers of theory but rather airing my thoughts aloud as the chalky, crumbly sentences join hands transforming into crimson geranium and the thin wispy floating cirrus clouds or the silent, gnawing agony of unbroken silence.
Reading poetry gives me the opportunity to reaffirm myself in the power of words. It is a journey punctuated with dialogue, debate, monologue, interrogation, contemplation (an unending list) seeking an answer to a question, sometimes fulfilling, sometimes not, but never a full stop. It is also an indulgent nostalgia, picking up some long-forgotten wanderings, a page here, a reminiscence there. Proust said, it is only in remembrance that things come into being. It is a terrain where tangible and intangible cross swords, where choices are aired and divisions take birth. That is why it counts. The self as a decision maker makes itself apparent. It is for this reason it is adored, admired, slandered and hundred other tags get attached. And this is not an easy job because you are baring yourself, naked, you are taking the plunge to open the self a little more so that a space of different representation is born. You are holding a flame- torch to create forms in an otherwise primitive darkness. You have burnt your bridges. Language is a tool only. Poets in spite of their diversity in language, in everydayness, have something common that is touching, humane, translating the ordinary into creative uncommon. Perhaps, poetry is the nostalgia for the exclusive, in a world where duplicates multiply only to vanish, sucked by the maelstrom of change.
I feel a profound sense of fellowship with the poets, with most of their ideas, their dreams and visions. Poetry is life-giving absurdity. It is this terrible force of absurdity, of illogic – once you have responded to its lure – that I suspect makes us love the witching hour when the night becomes a slab of stillness, when invisible islands become more green than any monsoon leaf and the water bluer than all the lapis lazulis of the world put together. Somewhere a song rises, it is the melody of a poem, a hymn, rising from our depths to celebrate what is simple and natural. We realize, that poetry lies everywhere. Poetry is the home we carry within us, a much denied but irrefutable home. All of a sudden we understand our melancholies, our pain and friendship. We open to other’s suffering with what Levinas called infinite, absurd compassion. It is absurd for it is not based on any ratiocinative calculation of blame and responsibility. It is infinite for it absorbs the ‘I’ into oblivion, at least for that moment.
The poets have always made it clear that poetry matters, it is a sharp tool to thwart any muzzling of the freedom of expression. Never, perhaps have they in isolation or in group, in solitude and noise have painfully experienced this brutal responsibility. To keep this freedom and liberty in poetry alive, I believe, one needs to write, move on, even if massive buttresses in the name of priests of religion, priests of politics, priests of society bar the way. The advocates of violence resting on the power of money, force, coercion and cruelty, covered with an apparent beneficent shroud, occasionally hypnotic, have to be addressed. In the world outside, peace and turbulence will come and go, and life will carry on, at times, with pretences. But one must be aware. I wonder what the hell are we doing? The cruellest thing is, there is no answer. And more: we have become, abnormally enough, used to this silence. In this truncated world of missives and video games, illusions disappear, the pastoral world of demons and kings under grandma-blanket have become superfluous. Departures, tears, bereavement—a silly waste of time. Our existences have become soulless.
Man is a very delicately balanced animal. The prime concern is to survive at any cost. But that does not mean a slave like existence. He has to do away with any affliction of the spine, ripping apart the comforting layers and letting the buttresses be assailed with tempest, deep and dense. Let the Poets dream. “When we dream that dream,” Novalis says, “waking is near at hand”. The borders are porous. Let the gods come down. Let there be a white god, a brown god, a yellow and a black one. It is only then that we can expect new horizons fertile enough to take root and branch out to the all embracing sky.
I love these lines of George L. Pattison in his A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
Beyond the question of knowledge
are poetry, madness, love –
but if these are not and cannot be knowledge
they may yet be best of all
