Glass Consciousness
Brinda Bose & Prasanta Chakravarty The self-reflexive Stephane Mallarme, acutely aware of the limitations of language, acknowledges in his essay ‘Bucolique’ the inability of language to contain grandeur. Language cannot and should not accommodate what lies beyond its grasp, he says. But writing necessitates a human language to be in cooperation with the inexpressible. The moment the poet realizes that his expressions are not sufficiently elevated for his purpose, his language collapses into denial. Hence, his frequent refuge in inspiration. Surely, however, language can create its own grandeur if it concedes the ineffability of expressing the fleeting: smells, colors, a woman’s features, nature and sound? Mallarme is, thus, explorative in his blancs, emphasizing the white spaces surrounding the poem: the image disintegrates, but so does the syntax which once sustained it. The idea of the inexpressible, that words are inadequate in expressing the sublimity of a divine nature, reflects a continuance of two traditions: the rhetorical-literary and the mystical-religious. The first attests to the speaker’s self-confessed inadequacy or modesty or is employed to laud a creature who is indescribable: Dante exploits this device, especially in his praise of Beatrice. The mystical-religious tradition of ineffability, on the other hand, relies on the belief that God exists beyond the limits of human reason and language. This ‘inexpressibility topos,’ as Ernst Robert Curtius calls it in his majestic work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, has made a grand return in affirming a new formalism in literary scholarship. The expressive material is self-sufficient, aver Isobel Armstrong in The Radical Aesthetic and Sianne Ngai in Categories of the Aesthetic; writing about ‘air’ in Victorian Poetry in an earlier work, Armstrong says: “An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an ‘influence’, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs…” In The Radical Aesthetic, Armstrong tarries with a judicious anxiety somewhere in the broken middle between world and word, with a certain rhetoric of approximation and curtailment, a cordon sanitaire that the critical act seems sometimes to want to throw around its object of analysis. But there is an impulse to strive for that inexpressible form: in her remarkable investigation of the cultural history of glass, for instance. This is before the biographical ineffability of cultural artefacts such as cod, nutmeg, salt, dust, TB and the colour mauve became fashionable. Her work on glass implies the active participation of the substance itself in forming consciousness, what she evocatively calls ‘glass consciousness,’ a phrase which is meant to evoke not just heightened awareness and sensitivity to glass in the new culture of lustre and transparency that burgeoned in the nineteenth century, but a kind of thought and awareness into which vitreous form and organisation have entered and begun to operate. In place of struggle, there is now regulated play. She wants us to be able to see the many ways in which experience is art-work, even as it furnishes raw material for works of art: a notion of the aesthetic which must find a way of having to do with dreams, dancing and gunfire as well as odes and sculptures. The aesthetic will be preserved as the name of the form-giving propensity lifted up to its highest form. As such, it will be what ‘quite simply keeps us alive.’ The aesthetic holds play and disintegration together in Armstrong, which is a return to the cognitive purchase of the inexpressible. In order to re-imagine the inexpressible topos, Sianne Ngai rotates the repertoire of aesthetic categories to contemporize them, in both her earlier work Ugly Feelings and this new one. She is interested in the petite bon¬heur – the charmingly irrelevant and infectious. In Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai offers us a quotidian triad of aesthetic categories: the zany, the interesting, and the cute – categories which are supposedly marginal to historical accounts of postmodernism as well as to canonical aesthetic theory. Ngai argues that the idea of ‘the aesthetic’ has been transformed by the performance-driven, information-saturated, networked, hyper-commodified world of late capitalism, when im¬material labor is being increasingly aestheticized. The zany, the cute, and the interesting correspond to major representational modes: comedy, in the case of zaniness; romance, in cuteness; realism, in interesting. It is an aesthetic disclosing a surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings – ranging from tenderness to aggression – which we harbour toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreat¬ening commodities. If cute is cool, then zany is its obverse: hot. Hot under the collar, hot and bothered, hot to trot. Naturally hot is the aesthetic unit that shares the space of performance: dance, theatre, happenings, television, film. Ngai is absolutely aware of the inconsequentiality and ‘mereness’ of her formulations, but it is this precise intangibility – the ‘inexpressibility topos’ – that she returns to by making these fleeting moments deeply aesthetic, as opposed to the classical aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime. When reverence for the aesthetic as such, though still advocated by many, no longer seems self-evidently desirable or definable, Ngai makes fun and unfun, interest and boredom, tenderness and aggression part of her new aesthetic repertoire. What does it mean to work with a poetics of air and odour, a philosophy of tremor – that is, to think about the inexpressible once again for our times? Previously blind and insensate material forms prove to be alive with information for the new formalists – who have arrived after theory, as it were. How, they ask, will an aesthetics founded upon the laborious, informing confrontations of the material and the mental, help us to manoeuvre life in which the prerogatives of living seem so little assured and in which material processes, from viruses to hurricanes, have come to seem so unnervingly vivacious? It is through
The City and the Writer: In Bogota with Gonzalo Marquez Cristo
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Bogotá as you feel/see it? I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million people where chaos is opposed to a great life force that keeps you from succumbing. One graffiti emblematic of the seventies, written by an anonymous hand in a salsa bar said: “el país se derrumba y nosotros de rumba” (The country is falling apart and we are celebrating).But it is this playful and delirious state founded by the nocturnal exorcism of dance and celebration that collectively frees the harsh reality of a people who have not solved the most basic experiential problems. Bogotá, therefore, to many sensitive people, is a city built during the night and destroyed with the wound of dawn. What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city? Working as a journalist in November 1985, I covered the developments on the ground when the M-19 guerrilla group took over the Palace of Justice. It ended with a bloody military response and more than a hundred dead and several disappeared. I remember the sound of the guns, since I was five blocks from the Plaza de Bolívar, which was where the military with the backing of then President Belisario Betancur, undertook the recapture of the building which ended in the massacre. Today, 25 years later, finally television images have been shown of guerrillas and civilians who came out of the Palace of Justice alive only, heinously, to be killed by the military in the days that followed. Despite all those who fight against “memoricide,” those responsible for that grim day have not been convicted. What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most, of the city? Since the work of the great architect, Rogelio Salmona (1927-2007), who built the iconic Torres del Parque at the end of the sixties, where the use of exposed brick achieved its consecration, the color of the city began to change, and in just three decades it has become a red city, which its inhabitants barely notice submerged as they are in this familiar landscape. His most important designs such as the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez and the Biblioteca Virgilio Barco aremasterworks—with their bare architectural technique, which has produced many imitators. They are simply majestic. What writer(s) from here should we read? Antonio Caballero, Luis Fayad, Evelio Rosero and Mauricio Contreras Hernández, who in some of their works have pursued the same “spirit of place” with which Lawrence Durrell was obsessed while working on Alexandria and Avignon. This extraordinary English novelist declares in one of his texts that if Paris disappeared and were re-founded by the Cossacks or the Mongols a couple of centuries later, someone would write In Search of Lost Time. With this, I mean to say that, the landscape determines our dreams and sometimes shapes our existence. Is there a place here you return to often? When traveling by cable car to Monserrate, Bogotá, the guardian mountain, you can appreciate the city in all its dimensions and take heed of the voracity of its progress, the successes and failures of the giant hive that we have created without the least bit of precaution. From this towering height, I like to observe the path the sun uses—when wounded and in retreat—to escape. Also, I return frequently to the Quinta de Bolivar, the house where the Liberator loved his Manuelita, (Manuelita Sáenz was the mistress of Simon Bolivar, who freed what currently is Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, from the Spanish in the 19th century), and where you can rest beneath the same shade that covered him, offered by those beautiful, hundreds-of-years-old trees. I return to the Gold Museum where the refined technique of pre-Colombian artisans produced pieces that practically levitate. The colonial barrio of La Candelaria is filled with secret places challenging the flight of time—the Botero Museum, contains a hundred paintings by great artists which were part of the master’s private collection of Antioquia and donated to Bogotá in the year 2000, like “Women of Gallant Life” by Paul Delvaux, among many others. Is there an iconic literary place we should know? Silva’s Poetry House, where the poet José Asunción, one of the pioneers of Modernism in 1896 committed suicide, shot in the heart. The Goce Pagano, the first salsa bar Bogotá had, and which, because of the marginal status of the music at the time, was frequented by prostitutes, thieves, and the rebel writers of the seventies and eighties. Are there hidden cities within this city that have intrigued or seduced you? All cities have two faces, a visible one and another, invisible one, which is always the more dazzling. The work of the poet is to make visible the invisible. Sometimes I wonder if the work of the lover or of the mystic is not the opposite: making invisible the visible, since why else would the body of the beloved sometimes be made of smoke or mist? Where does passion live here? Every city is a hieroglyphic sign, an anagram of sensations, a maze of affection and love, and so memory dances in the city streets in an unpredictable way, attacking you in the street corners and theaters, embodied in bars in late hours—and that is where life seems to exist for a moment. What is the title of one of your poems about Bogotá and what inspired it exactly? “The Incandescent Shadow” is the title of a long poem I wrote to exorcise my hometown. This culminating text
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Rupleena Bose ‘Oh, disgraced Radha Rascal Krishna mounts the riverside Kadam-tree, Dear girl, step not into that river. Not the fair, not the village, not the ghat, Step not for your shame The mother-in-law names you disgraced Radha. Dear girl, step not into that river’ (trans. mine) Kalankini Radha (disgraced Radha) a folk song from the bhawaiya musical tradition of North Bengal takes the path of the river that flows into the popular and with it one of the sung stories of Radha’s moment of transgression. Boundaries necessitate transgression almost as if one derives its identity from the other, like this song reminding of the forbidden gently urges Radha towards the location of her desire. It is of course to be remembered that the transgression is a recurring theme in Indian mythical and folk narrative forms, named adultery in socio-legal terms. Adultery has been a central anxiety, disrupting through the site of marriage the very foundation of order and governance. However every story of stepping over boundaries is not a story of transgression. In these three novellas translated from Bengali and brought out by Penguin, the predominant idea is that of sin and adultery yet none quite delve into the realm of transgression towards desire rather remaining in the peripheries. Located firmly in a comfortable middle class universe, Maloti begins an intimate first person narrative which begins with her act of transgression and travels back deeper into her neatly divided worlds of lack and fulfilment. “It’s over-it happened-there’s nothing to say… How did it happen? Easy. In fact I don’t know why it didn’t happen before.” Beginning with these words, as the narrative alternates between the story and the arguments of Maloti and Nayanangshu and the instances that build a picture of a exalted idea of love and marriage necessitated with a negation of their own sexuality. Buddhadeva Bose’s It Rained All Night, translated by Clinton. B. Seely was first published in Bengali in 1967. It is also important to note that there was an obscenity court case against Basu in 1970, which goes to show that this narrative even though it depends on the established masculine and feminine roles threatened the moral order of patriarchal society. “This is why I love you so. You speak out your desire, you’re not timid, you’re not even careful- you play with your cards face up on the table, and that’s why no one has been, or will be able to hinder you. The traditional gender roles are firmly rooted in Maloti’s imagination as she voices the realisation of her individuality through the necessity of desire within the idea of love but the narrative never quite looks at the possibility of desire without love as a qualifier. However the interesting portrait which emerges in It rained all night is through the voice given to the husband Nayanangshu. So you realized you were on the verge of real danger, Maloti-why weren’t you more careful? But what could I have done. Everything was out of my hands…On the one hand you claim to be a person with independent will, yet you want to place the responsibility on your husband? In it’s narrative style Nayanangshu’s voice is the constructed voice of an intellectual with an intense sense of propriety, which has no space for sexual gratification. His is a fear of the body almost as if the body can disrupt order. Maloti’s body, his own body, Goyna’s body, Kusum’s body, the woman’s body, lower middle class bodies. Real bodies bring out fear of disruption in Nayanangshu as opposed to Botticelli’s Venus, which remains aesthetic and unreal, never quite disrupting any moral, social order. Nayanangshu’s is a construction of the Bengali gentleman, ‘bhadralok’ dating back to the reform movement where his primarily vocation is the fashioning of his wife and his marriage as a model of new modern patriarchy. Taking off from where Tagore’s Ghaire/Baire (trans. Home and the World) started, Nayanangshu’s narrative is that of the University professor moulded by the world of literary tropes and western education yet unable to negotiate desire within his immediate social/ moral universe. Ridding oneself of the conservatism of the middle class family structure in the 1970’s, Nayanangshu attempts at self-fashioning and Maloti’s understanding of her identity both tell a tale of politics filtering into the intimate, spaces which are usually silent and almost never uttered in own’s voice. A larger question is of-course raised about the basic premise on which marriage is based, that of ownership. A contract, which defines itself by trapping bodies as properties within the institution they inhabit. Love in such a context becomes like the only legitimate narrative carefully clothing desire and making transgression easier to accept. In any other case, guilt is the only thing that holds the possibility of redemption. When she thought of Debashish she felt uncomfortable looking at Sachin. She couldn’t look at her children either…She even feared her own shadow. There Was No One At The Bus Stop by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay looks back at the burden of an adulterous relationship between Trina and Debashish carried by both into their respective psyches. Written in 1974 and now translated into English by Arunava Sinha, There Was No One… does not step into any uncomfortable territory in the choices taken by the characters. Trina lives in a house haunted by her guilt of her affair along with the gaze of knowledge and disregard of her family. Debashish, on the other hand struggles with the memory of his bad marriage, his wife’s suicide and his son’s memory of his dead mother. Somewhere in the loneliness of their urban affluent lives, both try to hold on their tumultuous affair, which can at best stay a guilty aberration. No, there would be someone. Debashish. He was quite mad. He called her in a way that made everyone know of it. Sachin knew, the children too. Trina’s heart trembled all the time. Sometimes in the excitement of a forbidden relationship. Sometimes in fear. Sachin and
That Tree is a Myth
Pranabendu Dasgupta Charred Wood piece Whose stench do you carry along, charred wood piece? Is it my body of that prior birth that gutted my Hindu motherland? Am I not still alive in this birth—wherefore this smokescreen? I am not dead, charred wood piece, no? Not yet vamoosed in human suspicion-bile? See how I can feel love, still I do. Still I can sprint straight onto that gaping field there Ah, smouldering wood piece dear, why often do you reek so downright stark? ………. Yo-Yo Now at hand, now shifting Faith, funds, libido, politics Quite secure strings on my palm, fingertips But strange now hops, skips apace Now at hand. Eludes again. Thus things go on. Suppose I fail to stick with the tension Every shred falls off then. Strings entangle: all these fun stuff Goes haywire, what are mine Faith, funds, libido, politics. ………. Relationships Do not quite feel like going anywhere these days Resentment, humiliation, jealousy, disregard Who do I turn to? 15 years past that buddy who would give away his soul Freely, in daily restaurant sessions Now thinks nothing save writing novels Novels? So famous everyone, hectic Have turned into ants for vocation—all No, do not quite feel like going anywhere these days. But sometimes, from that double-decker bus I spy Young things, brightly dressed, walking past the plaza Laughter, pure animation, exchanging lightning glances—love and kill (as if a sprightly stream dashes past two stilly hills) I wish I could get down to the road and announce: “Listen, I do not know any one of you, still how so much I love you from afar Would you care to take me with you for a while?” ………. The Tree All of them ganged up to hack down that tree Once, twice, a third time…countless Hew after hew, slash next slash Now peeling off, grazing the crust The birds nesting inside, scampered off to the sky The whole forest resounded with those thumping hatchets But after chopping for the whole day When the tree unmoved stood its ground Exasperated they said: The tree actually isn’t there, you know The whole thing about the tree is a myth. ………. Mute Textile Plant Unspeaking textile plant, how long will this go on? So much work is left undone, fabric amassed Dumped beneath your feet Will you not match thread to thread, sketch patterns once again? Have you thought about how many remain exposed, bare If you do not clothe them? Unless you deliver designs, no floral blouse on our pretty maid. These broken, hushed pieces of fabric. Ah, meaningless, garbage all otherwise. Unspeaking textile plant, like a teleprinter speak up now Like a gushing spring, surge yourself into work. Pranabendu Dasgupta died in 2007. adminhumanitiesunderground.org