The Crossover Is In The Mind
Prasanta Chakravarty The Filter People are mostly helpless, mostly tangled and messy. Irresponsible with our lives. With others’ lives too. We repeatedly falter. This, our human condition. This word—irresponsibility, and its consequent aftermath: failing, is what art concerns itself with. Not all art. But some—the majestic ones, which also respect immediacy of experience. I mean the full panoply of experience, warts and all. Mostly warts. Festering wounds, jetsam of our deviancy and our punishments. Majestic because only such art is able to bridge the gap between the fantastic and the material. In such forms, our dreams and nightmares get stitched with our hourly slavishness, our moments of hard toil. Those who are immersed in this endeavour—artists and connoisseurs, may seem detached and unmoved at first glance. But actually their canvasses throb with life—with life’s abandonings, ennui, and its brute moments. And then sometimes, only sometimes, a heroic rising from that sense of acute pessimism by letting oneself and one’s creations pass through the abject. Always by passing. There is no shortcut. This passing is like a purgatory, a filter if you like. This is a streak—in Aeschylus and in Dante, in Gauguin and Ramkinkar we see this work. When it was alleged his plays revealed the Eleusinian mysteries, Aeschylus took refuge in the altar of Dionysius. And The Libation Bearers would announce: “But, as a beam balances, so/Sudden disasters wait, to strike/Some in brightness, some in gloom.” In Muktibodh and Binoy Majumdar, in different ways, we witness a distilled version that emerges after traversing life’s purgatories. Taslima Nasreen, with her many failings, will live because she squares her sense of social justice with an equal sense of squeezing out the last drop of life’s bounties. A full life and a fuller expression of that living. Her poetry is a particular case in point: “জন্মের দায়, প্রতিভার পাপ নিয়ে/নিত্য নিয়ত পাথর সরিয়ে হাঁটি–The toll of life, bearing this talent-sin/This trudge, dislodging stone after stone, every single day.” A real artist will square with herself, with a restlessness that develops out of a sense of being always at historical and personal crossroads, which at times is also a performance of sorts. You do not commit treachery with this urge to square. The fallout, the art object that arises out of such a steeling process, is where reality shimmers with a certain incandescence. It appears suddenly in front of us in its grandeur and ugliness. Stark. That is what disturbs all order. The starkness of Antigone’s acts. Or Blake’s Laocoon, when its re-coding of the struggling contortions and agony, bursts forth into that terrible prophecy. There is no distortion of historical reality in such art—just a refracted form of it, with an excess force that is hard to map, but its power felt and striking. For the social sciences, which consist of responsible people, fairness is the chief concern. Even when one deals in social and political unfairness—the issue of justice is hard to avoid. It is a significant concern, but it falls short of addressing our relentless, inevitable back and forth between what is social and what is asocial, antisocial and finally cosmic. The Institutions No way can one justify the pursuit of art with any form of success. So, first of all let us keep that aside. Unambiguously. As I have said, art and literature nourish a dogged pursuit to fail, dwindle and vanish. To be with those who are destined to lose. This drive affects art, even while indulging in more surpassing moulds of pleasure (catharsis, jouissance). Institutions, on the other hand, will always have a sense of success and responsibility imbued within them, howsoever public and democratic their raison de etre might be. In the West, that starts with Aristotle’s Lyceum—which had a serious social aim. There are similar aims in other great visionaries who have given a lifetime to the creative imagination—Tagore, Ivan Illych, Romain Rolland. The Medicis or the Habsburgs in Vienna have been exemplary in this regard. Or at a slight remove, even Lenin or Nehru in the last century patronized culture. On a more subterranean level, the influence of royal, princely aesthetics and a cosmopolitan ‘collector’s sensibility’ on Indian cinema, tourism and popular culture has been enormous. So, at one end of the spectrum, the politics of art is connected with a certain kind of institutionalizing of art. Chapels and temples and sangharams and their patrons have tried to harness the artistic impulse. Universities, libraries, theatres and coffeehouses made art polite, rational, virtuous and therefore, detached from its gravity and levity alike. We have moved at best from churches to charitable foundations and endowments. These changes did secularize things and made the ‘discourse’ critical but the price of that very criticality has been to look askance at art’s power, which is actually political in a far wider sense. Pronounced social aim, paradoxically, has often diminished art’s excesses and silences. The whole edifice stands on a singular idea: commitment to culture, which has little to do with art. For instance, rhetoric as a political tool is vital for any litterateur or an orator. This, an ideologue might overlook or be suspicious of. Art is not a discourse or a field where we intervene, save in a very limited sense. See, artists are often poor people—literally. So they need patrons—state or market or plain philanthropy. The financiers have their own motive—responsibility, commissioning, profit, display. We cannot so easily be judgmental about money or fame. In fact, many great artists knew exactly how to do well in life—Shakespeare being the greatest example. He bought multiple houses and further property in and around Stratford. Competition and social climbing among artists is a given just like in any another conglomerate. We really have to be careful before we get on the high horse of political righteousness. But politics is about taking a principled partisan position regardless, not plain expediency. It is also not about personal enmity or grudge or scheming. In this context, the word poverty also comes with a
A Horseradish Is No Sweeter Than A Radish
Anna Politkovskaya Selections from A Russian Diary. Time covered here: 2003-2004 [Anna could have left Russia. Family and friends had urged her to leave. Russian soldiers, police, oligarchs, criminal gangs, and the highest-ranking Russian politicians had explicitly threatened her life. When she grew violently ill after sipping a cup of tea on a flight into Beslan to negotiate during the school hostage crisis in 2004, she saw it was an attempt to silence her there and then. Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who became a critic of Vladimir Putin, told her to leave Russia. But she kept on: “Our society isn’t a society anymore,” she wrote. “It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells…..”. On the day Anna was shot to death, October 7, 2006, in the elevator of her apartment block on Lesnaya Street, the editor of Novaya Gazeta says that she was about to file a long story on torture as it is routinely conducted by Chechen security forces supported by Russia. That story will almost certainly never be read by anyone, inside or outside Russia. Even the substance of it will probably never be known. Russian police seized her notes, her computer hard drive, and photographs of two people she would reportedly accuse of torture.] *** December 8 Early in the morning, political analysts assembled on the Free Speech program to discuss the results as they came in. They were jittery. Igor Bunin talked of a crisis of Russian liberalism, about how the Yukos affair had suddenly aroused a wave of antioligarchic feeling in the middle of the campaign. They talked about the hatred that had accumulated in the hearts of many people, “especially decent people who could not bring themselves to support Zhirinovsky,” and the fact that the eclectic United Russia Party had managed to unite everybody, from the most liberal to the most reactionary. He predicted that the president would now stand in for the liberals in the ruling elite. Free Speech was shortly to be taken off the air by its parent company NTV, to which Putin commented, “Who needs a talk show for political losers?” December 9 At 10:53 a.m. today a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the Nationale Hotel in Moscow, across the square from the Duma and 145 meters [160 yards] from the Kremlin. “Where is this Duma?” she asked a passerby, before exploding. For a long time the head of a Chinese tourist who had been next to her lay on the asphalt without its body. December 11 This morning there was more of the same, a reputation destroyed by the Kremlin’s embrace. Andrey Makarevich was an underground rock musician in the Soviet period, a dissident, a fighter against the KGB,* who used to sing with passion, “Don’t bow your head before the changeful world. Some day that world will bow its head to us!” It was the anthem of the first years of democracy under Yeltsin. Today, on live television on the state-run Channel One, he is being presented with a medal “For Services to the Fatherland. December 12 Constitution Day. A holiday. Moscow is flooded with militiamen and agents in plain clothes. There are dogs everywhere, searching for explosives. The president held a grand reception in the Kremlin for the political and oligarchic elite and made a speech about human rights, predicated on the notion that they had triumphed in Russia. Yeltsin was there, looking fitter and younger, but with mental problems written all over his face. He was there because the Constitution was adopted during his presidency. He is not usually invited to Putin’s Kremlin. December 23 Ritual murders are taking place in Moscow. A second severed head has been found in the past twenty-four hours, this time in the district of Go-lianovo in the east of Moscow. It was in a rubbish container on Altaiskaya Street. Yesterday evening, a head in a plastic bag was found lying on a table in the courtyard outside Apartment Building 3 on Krasnoyarskaya Street. Both men had been dead for twenty-four hours before the discovery. The circumstances in the two cases are almost identical: the victims are from the Caucasus, aged thirty to forty, and have dark hair. Their identities are unknown. The heads were found two-thirds of a mile apart. December 27 Sterligov, the coffin maker, has been disqualified from standing by the Central Electoral Commission. Viktor Anpilov, a clown from the Workers’ Russia Party, promptly put himself forward. A horseradish is no sweeter than a radish. December 28 At last they have found a worthy opponent for Putin: Sergey Mironov,* the speaker of the Soviet of the Federation, has been proposed by the Party of Life (another of the dwarf parties set up by the presidential administration’s deputy head, Vladislav Surkov*). He immediately announced, “I support Putin.” The conference of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The Communists have proposed Nikolai Kharitonov, an odd, garrulous man who used to be a KGB officer. How wonderful! Ivan Rybkin has announced he will stand. He is the creature of Putin’s main opponent, Boris Berezovsky,* now in exile abroad. Rybkin used to be the speaker of the Duma and chairman of the National Security Council. Who is he today? Time will tell. Meanwhile, Moscow is at a standstill. The rich haven’t a care in the world; they are abroad on vacation. Moscow is very rich. All the restaurants, even the most expensive, are crammed or closed for corporate parties. The tables are laden with delicacies beyond the imaginings of the rest of Russia. Thousands of dollars are spent in an evening. Is this the last fling of the twenty-first century’s New Economic Policy? December 30 Putin needed competitors, and he has received them as a New Year’s gift. The new candidates have all promptly declared that the main thing is not to win but to take part. January 5 Putin holds a cabinet meeting. “We need to