I Put Aside The Inspection Of My Great Talent
Devi Prasad Mishra ___________________ POEMS ARE PARAMOUNT Poetry is possible only in the mother tongue so said a poet One should stick to one’s tongue then lest one forget it Also that one may never forget That fathers are the first dictators And as I said before the first communists are the mothers Neighbours have never assured us they will not turn fascists At the very start of the Allahabad to Delhi rail journey A person proposed we exchange seats And then what else there was to possibly exchange I said I will not exchange my chaos with anyone One gets paid well for idiotic films that lie he said getting off The protection that a poet must get from the Constitution is given to the cow I commented before I left He was chewing paan and he laughed Some of the spit came right on my face Poems must be written lest poets be reduced to a moral minority Poems must be written to remember Muhammad Ali as boxer That Vietnam ,is a nation Palestine worth settling in Being Rohit Vemula means being human Only poems register the passing Of seasons and sisters, and falling of leaves and men Poems must be written because only poets return awards And they know the solitary art of crying while writing a poem on Akhlaq. (Translated by Asad Zaidi) *** I COVET MY RUINATION TO ENCOUNTER TRUTH About others I cannot say But my trade goes on fine without Arnab Goswami I covet my ruination to encounter truth— No harm if hair too is included in the grand Einsteinian disarray Che’s visage and Stephen Hawking’s body Fassbinder’s soul and Ritwik Ghatak’s black & white For a few days I put aside the inspection of my great talent Rest of the time I make do with my audacity and irreverence I feel assured by the empty hall during my poetry-reading session Three people had appeared during Ismat Chugtai’s last rites During the funeral services of Raghuvir Sahay there were a few more I too was there but people did not know me then nor do they know me now There was no facebook then and now there is but I never knew how to be on it I used to carry a strange and crabby mien As if after drawing a semi abstract charcoal portrait of a perennial dissenter The artist ran away with his lover In a society where Sunny Leone, Modi and Amitabh Bachchan tweets receive the highest like-followers Talking to oneself at 1 am in the morning And to be sleepless because One’s nephew in Singapore is a Modi supporter is quite dry and desolate an opponent I shall die of exploding veins It is only a sign of how each of us shall die Which means the culture minister shall die of the poison within Come, before we depart let us complete the ritual of asking why people watch the films of Shah Rukh Khan at all? And pray, why are numerous IPL matches and the lost countenance of Rajiv Shukla embroiled within it? If you remember I have said many times that no love is illicit And contempt for the tyrant is the most romantic work-load. I am getting late abdicating this world But to quit my lover’s bed I am forging a few excuses All right, let us consider this poem to be over at this point And you all please collect subscriptions for my quitting Delhi I don’t know for how long I shall remain with this thought That how can a fascist be named Ramakant Pande? (Translation: HUG) *** कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए जैसा कि एक कवि कहता है कि मातृभाषा में ही लिखी जा सकती है कविता तो मातृभाषा को याद रखने के लिए लिखी जानी चाहिए कविता और इसलिए भी कि यह समझ धुंधली न हो कि पिता पहला तानाशाह होते हैं और जैसा कि मैं कह गया हूं मांएं पहला कम्युनिस्ट पड़ोसियों ने फाशिस्ट न होने की गारंटी कभी नहीं दी इलाहाबाद से दिल्ली के सफर के शुरू में एक आदमी ने सीट को एक्सचेंज करने का प्रस्ताव रखा फिर उसने कहा कि और क्या एक्सचेंज किया जा सकता है मैंने कहा कि मैं किसी को अपना कोहराम नहीं देने वाला जाते-जाते वह कह गया कि झूठ पर फिल्म बनाने के बहुत पैसे मिलते हैं मैंने गायब होने के पहले कहा कि जो संरक्षण संविधान में कवि को मिलना चाहिए था वह गाय को मिल गया पान खाते हुए वह हंस पड़ा और उसका सारा थूक मेरे मुंह पर पड़ गया कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए ताकि कवि नैतिक अल्पसंख्यक न रह जाएं कविताएं लिखी जानी चाहिए ताकि मुक्केबाज के तौर पर मुहम्मद अली की याद रहे और देश के तौर पर वियतनाम की और बसने के लिए फिलिस्तीन से बेहतर कोई देश न लगे और वेमुला होना सबसे ज्यादा मनुष्य होना लगे कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए क्योंकि ऋतुओं और बहनों के बगल से गुजरने को कविताएं ही रजिस्टर करती हैं और पत्तों और आदमी के गिरने को कविताएं लिखी जानी चाहिए क्योंकि कवि ही करते हैं वापस पुरस्कार और उन्हें ही आती है अखलाक पर कविताएं लिखते हुए रो पड़ने की अप्रतिम कला *** सत्य को पाने में मुझे अपनी दुर्गति चाहिए औरों की मैं नहीं जानता लेकिन मेरा काम अर्णव गोस्वामी के बिना चल जाता है सत्य को पाने में मुझे अपनी दुर्गति चाहिए — आइंस्टीन का बिखराव जिसमें बाल भी शामिल हों तो क्या हर्ज चे का चेहरा और स्टीफन हाकिंग का शरीर फासबिंडर की आत्मा और ऋत्विक घटक का काला-सफेद मैं अपने प्रतिभावान होने का सर्वेक्षण कुछ दिनों के लिए टाल रहा हूं — बचे समय में मैं अपने दुस्साहस से काम चला लूंगा और असहमति से मैं अपने काव्य-पाठ में खाली हॉल से आश्वस्त हुआ इस्मत-चुगताई की अंत्येष्टि में तीन लोग थे रघुवीर सहाय के दाह-संस्कार में कुछ ज्यादा थे मैं भी था लेकिन मुझे लोग नहीं जानते थे अब भी नहीं जानते तब फेसबुक नहीं था और अब है तो मुझे उस पर होना नहीं आया मेरे पास अजीब झुंझलाया चेहरा था कि जैसे किसी सतत असहमत का आधा अमूर्त चेहरा चारकोल से बनाकर कलाकार अपनी प्रेमिका के साथ भाग गया हो जिस समाज में सनी लियोनी, मोदी और अमिताभ बच्चन के ट्विटर पर सबसे ज्यादा लाइक-फॉलोवर हों उसमें रात एक बजे खुद के साथ खुद का होना और इस बात पर नींद का न आना कि सिंगापुर में रहने वाला आपका भांजा मोदी समर्थक है काफी अजीब और बियाबान विपक्ष है मैं अंदर-अंदर ही फटती नस से मरूंगा — यह केवल संकेत है कि कौन किससे मरेगा मतलब कि संस्कृति मंत्री अपने भीतर के जहर से मरेगा आइए अब चलते हुए पूछ ही लेते हैं कि लोग शाहरुख खान की फिल्में क्यों देखते हैं और आईपीएल के बीसियों मैच और उनमें फंसा राजीव शुक्ला का बहुत खाया चेहरा अगर आपको याद हो तो मैंने कई बार कहा है कि कोई भी प्रेम अवैध नहीं होता और अत्याचारी से घृणा सबसे रोमांटिक कार्यभार है पृथ्वी छोड़ने में मुझे देर हो रही है लेकिन प्रेमिका का बिस्तर छोड़ने में भी मैं कई तरह के बहाने करता रहा हूं चलिए इस कविता को यहीं खत्म मान लें और मेरे लिए दिल्ली छोड़ने के टिकट का चंदा इकट्ठा करें मैं पता नहीं कब से यही सोचे जा रहा हूं कि एक फाशिस्ट का नाम रमाकांत पांडे कैसे हो सकता है *** [ The poems first appeared in the October 2016 issue of Pakhi magazine] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
95 Theses
Charles Bernstein ___________________ I am retiring in 2019, so take this as something of a swan song, or, anyway, duck soup. I leave the remainder of the theses to be filled in by you. Professionalism is a means not an end. Less is more. Professors are better off when they professionalize less and risk extinction when professionalization is primary. Professionalized scholarly writing often seems to play off a list of master-theorists who must be cited, even if the subject is overcoming mastery. A modest proposal: In your next essays and books don’t make any reference to the ten most cited authors in your field. Apply the death of the author to the ones that authorize that idea. Don’t cite authors, become an author. Then undo your own authority. If you write you are a writer. It is as simple as that and no amount of research, findings, conclusions, proposals, projects, and laboratories will change it a whit. Writing is a laboratory for the mind, its experiments are in syntax as much as analysis, arrangement as much as argument. Frame Lock was not built in a day. Tone jam is not a marmalade. Contradiction is closer to truth than consistency so don’t consistently emphasize contradiction. The truth is not the end of the essay but its point of departure. The fragment is more important for criticism today than for poetry. Not fragments: constellations. Positivism is as rhetorical as negativism. Reason abhors a rationalist. Which does not mean anything goes: anything is possible but only a very few things get through that eye of a needle that separates charm from harm. And often what appears as harm has got the charm. We’re better with alternatives to STEM Than when we go on imitating them. A recent Digital Humanities lecture presented both a fount and a font of information about a poem’s unusual digital typeface but not a word about the font’s meaning or ideology or how the visual display affected the interpretation of the poem. This was New Criticism with close reading not of the words of a text but the technology for generating its letters. Distant reading without reading is not reading. Close reading without toggling frames is myopia. Information everywhere but not a drop to drink. The question for macro and distant sociological approaches in the humanities, digital or otherwise, is not just what happens but also so what? and what for? “The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression.” —Emerson on Thoreau (1862) Criticism, scholarship, and poetry are all fonts of rhetoric. The aversion of rhetoric is an unkind kind of rhetoric. There is no formula for avoiding formulas. Sometimes what appears as unformulated is just new jeans with fashionable rips. Not that there is anything wrong with that. One size doesn’t fit all. (Each to his own goo, be true.) Not interdisciplinarity: non-disciplinarity. (Call it pragmatism.) If we want to emulate the natural sciences let us do by stressing speculation and collaboration (through multiple author essays). Expository writing needs to be balanced by non-expository writing. I don’t want trans-national studies I want non-national studies. Non-national studies would look at language-speaking groups and conversations among languages and across languages not based only on nation states but affinities, immigration, refugees, the displaced and diasporic, the nomadic, the national-non-conforming. Examples would be born-digital arts, poets writing in English irrespective of their national or first language, Yiddish, or to give a more historical example, the Medieval and European cultures approach of David Wallace here at Penn that looks not at discrete national literatures but rather “sequences of interconnected places.” Nothing suits us like our union suits, as the old ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) ad put it. Don’t mourn: unionize. There are no themes, histories, ideologies, ideas, terms, or categories uninflected (uninfected) by the often fractal, fractured, and fraught signifying practices that make them so. Ideas bleed re(a)d blood; the imaginary weeps wet tears. The real is no less so minding the body than embodying mind. Language is never more than an extension of reality. Form and style are not ornamental to meaning. No flapjacks without eggs. Impersonality is the hobgoblin of frightened prose. Autobiography and personal narrative is not a prophylactic against formulaic expression of received ideas. Contentious rhetoric opens dialog more than professionalized prose. But contentiousness as a mode of dominance is tyranny. Denunciation and defamation, even in the name of a good cause, destroys dialog. All professional rhetoric is pre-professional. The real cannot disappear. Even the appearance of disappearance is real. The absence of expressed identity is a form of identity. The expression of identity is, also, a mask. The poetry and poetics I read and write are not a product of the world financial system but of the world semantic system. Whenever you walk on a new road, you can be sure no one has spoilt it yet. —Menachim Mendel (Kotsker Rebbe) Whenever you think you have walked down a new road, you can be sure others have been there first. Try to find and acknowledge them. Feeling superior to the self-righteous makes you that. Taking pleasure in piety is piteous. The good longs for us but we are unworthy. Recently, a dean at my college declined to allow a class for a “diversity” requirement even though the syllabus included poetry in a dozen languages from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa. The dean saiddiversity needed to focus on only one group, one language. Diversity without uniformity is poetry and don’t count. For the colonial mind, decolonization is a new frontier to settle. It never hurts to add a joke. You know the one: three Jews four opinions? What you don’t hear is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third … To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric. “Away then with all those prophets who say to the community of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,’ and there is no peace.” My concern is more What is false? than
Great Literature Cannot Reach Half-Humans
HUG interviews Anil Kumar Yadav _____________________________ HUG: What do you do? Anil: Mostly I live in the subconscious, or in semi consciousness, shall we say. Something silently keeps on happening in my head. Not objective happening actually, but rather something is always ‘taking place’. And I am acutely aware of this drive. I am continually observing myself, as if in an out of body experience. I often have changed jobs or have not had stable jobs. So, I observe. May be there are three possible coordinates, each overlapping with the other. Not that these thoughts are all well formulated, but still— First there is an acute craving to find a new language. So that one can at least come somewhat closer to the real. But I keep on failing. My writing, its relevance, if any, seems to be only partial. I do have a language of my own; I nurture a particular way of expression, my style, that is—but that does not mean that I have discovered a new vocabulary. I am unable to make any profound connection with the passing moments of our time. I am also being quartered by a piercing, devastating sense of dread. Every waking moment. Even while half asleep. How shall I put it! See, there are these two parts in my mind. Two sides, yes. Each conspires and negates the other. Each will not allow the other to function at all. Not that these two sides are indignant with each other. They are not. They are like childhood playmates-बाल-सखा . There is this negative side; it wanders. This is my imaginative side. The positive side of my mind, on the other hand, keeps on thinking. It is driven by the worthy, necessary wishes of life. The third is about my non-faith in relations and friends. Particularly friends. Not that one needs friends in order to help solve things or to be by one’s side, during times difficult or joyous. That kind of sentimentality I have long let go. No, not that. But friends can actually sometimes invest in and refine one’s thought process. By brainstorming along with you about life’s various issues, they give you a sense of perspective, or so I used to think. But I have no faith in faith, none in relations—in love, friendship or relatives anymore. These not only work at a very superficial order of things, but the real point is that friends can never do anything about how you will actually deal with life or about your deepest concerns in life. I am far more connected now with my feelings and thoughts as I have learned to navigate life on my own terms. You do not rely upon faith anymore. You live life. Period. I gradually began feeling that all my so called affective relationships have no investment whatsoever with my concerns, with truth, with my fantasies, and with life’s realties at all. These are the things I do. HUG: What do you see? Anil: This word mainstream has lost all connotations because the margin keeps on shifting and morphing continuously. All these debates about the mainstream and the margin are simply putrified and ossified into meaninglessness. There are deep connivances. People that I see and work with are like gladiators, safeguarding and defending the interests of their emperors. I feel helpless and I can see this helplessness with utmost clarity. People like me are so beyond even the margins that even to remark or comment about politicians, corrupt godmen, criminals or the mafia raj seems to be meaningless. Such a small fry I am. The deep connect that the thinking, feeling class of people used to have with the local and the regional have just evaporated. Only the politicians are mostly connected with their constituencies, using that connection for their own ends. They will cry with you if your mother passes away, right? But the artists and the thinking class have left their public sense of critical and irreverent attitude in order to cater to mere publicity. Forget bohemianism; the artists are not even connected to their mohalla. The ubiquity of the tentacles of such a culture that the medium allows and proliferates makes me see helplessness with an even greater sense of clarity. All relationships are also part of the same change; they operate in flux. That is real. In fiction or in a travelogue, you refract the different modes of this forlorn, paralyzed reality. This helpless predicament becomes most vivid when I feel that my language is unable to reach people. I am a writer and I am unable to reach out with some serious concern or with some genuine humour to the people I write for? Just think of the level of vulnerability! One reason for that is my own limitation, I am sure. The other is that the levels of consciousness in my circle of readership are very very poor. I can only talk about the Hindi language readership. But I suspect the malaise goes deeper and is endemic. My purported readers are materialistic, wooly and thick. And the levels of feelings have gone numb. I am particularly thinking of the lower middle class, the poor and the half-humans. They do not see or hear. Their senses are numb. They have been made numb. They are destined to remain confused. See, for generations they have not had adequate food, shelter, education. And it is not just about economic exploitation. There is this rich exploitation in the name of religion or caste. Have you seen lower middle class folks carefully? Their gait and height and body weight? They are dwarfs. Great literature cannot reach half-humans. No sir. What finer aesthetic qualities are we talking about? Shall I then dumb down my own capabilities? That means I am sacrificing life and art in order to do some kind of penance, right, for being born in such situations in the subcontinent?So, I only observe these half-humans—sometimes with compassion, but often with disgust