The Counter-Romantic
[An Excerpt from The Opulence of Existence, First Edition January 2017 copyright©Prasanta Chakravarty & Three Essays Collective 2016 All rights reserved] _____________________________________________________ I’ll join with black despair against my soul, And to myself become an enemy. ~Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Act II, Scene ii সারা রাস্তা সোনার তারের মত শব্দ | The whole journey rings like a golden wire. ~অনন্ত ভাস্কর/Ananta Bhaskar, Swadesh Sen There lies a straightforward premise behind these essays: that there is an implacable impulse, a code which sometimes drives our aesthetic choices and political decisions—one that places life under a stubborn, primordial scalpel, then passes it through a luminous and unsentimental lens. That mode refuses to run along available courses. So richly and seriously is this mode attentive and attuned to the minutiae of life’s splendours and its deepening sorrows that it is doomed to walk an unescorted furrow. But that furrow does not isolate; no, it is not lyrical in its acceptance of our finitude. It rather takes us closer to: whatever is. We are not talking about vexations of the psyche here. Nor are we terribly worried about the ethical conundrum of the being. This mode also does not deal in experience past. No, in a world riven with inequity and bigotry, one must constantly refuse to let any ontological virtue ossify into a fixed identity or being. This collection of essays is rather about dire, unyielding journeys— undertakings, which are also enchanting, star-crossed spells. Such journeys shun the romantic overestimate of human virtue and moral capacity, current in our maudlin and dolorous culture. The appraisal of social facts happens through other, discrete routes. These routes keep out of ideational essences. The essays try to record a series of hard, heightened moments, each hoping to grapple with the forces of endurance along with an awed absorption of flux. Only when we are able to put ourselves in the mannerist gyre of such bewitchment can we revel and tremble before the opulence of existence. We are then able to stand aside. And controvert, when the time arrives. Only that much is worth recording. Shubha, one of the finest of our contemporary poets, captures this spare, stubborn drive rather accurately— एक आदमी प्रतिद्वंद्विता की औड़ से बाहर हो जाता है ख़ुद दौड़ की लाईन देखता है एक फ़िल्मी दृश्य की तरह उसके पार जैसे कुछ है जिसे देखता वह अकेला नहीं होता धारण करता है दुख और शोक चुपचाप इच्छाओं को ज़बान पर नहीं लाता कभी-कभी वह एक रहस्य की तरह नज़र आता है वह हँसता भी है और खाना भी खाता है। One man himself opts out of competition’s track Like a scene in a film he observes the finishing line As if there is something beyond it, seeing which He does not feel alone Wordlessly bears sorrow and grief Does not bring desires to his lips Sometimes he seems like a mystery He does smile and eats food too. But to assiduously, doggedly embark on life’s travails is not to practice and perpetrate the mystical. Quite the contrary. We do not just tremble like a guilty thing surprised in front of the mountain or the sceptre. There is no complacence of any massive calm. In a rapidly antagonistic and fractious world it is impossible to remain captivated by Blanqui’s eternal melancholic stars where we, guests on our planet, are just prisoners of the moment, “sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space.” That kind of tragic-romantic view shall lead us to accept a repetitive fixity in the universe: the ricorsi. Eventually, that will make us all vassals to power—natural or artificial. But opulence is about acknowledging and engaging with the differences and the wonderment that lie all around us. Without rhetoric or palliation. Purer forms of romanticism eventually would lead to negative forms of mood and imagination to the point of alienation from body and habitat. Susan Stewart in her nuanced, piercing work The Poet’s Freedom points out the contrast between Coleridge, whose fear of nothingness was expressed in his opium habit and rejection of fancy and Shelley, who mastered to “fear himself and love others.” It is Shelley who realizes that we are “thrown back on the task of forming our freedom,” and Coleridge who stands as a warning that “liberated from time and space, the imagination is nowhere.” Poetry and politics come together at these synapses—where imagination’s flight is thrown back on our travails and labour, until we soar once again. One may tentatively call such a calumnious absorption with things that pass by us: the counter-romantic, one that ferociously takes stock of transitions and recastings—that are born and bred within structures of power and conflict, sometimes measured and played out in the creation, reception and circulation of things that we call art. Only a counter-romantic spirit can save us from egotist, sentimental and antihistoricist forms of romanticism and at the same time keep on reminding us that life is much richer than what the dehumanizing forms of pragmatic, correct or realist undertakings will allow us to believe. This counter-romantic practice spreads in the very sensuousness and struggles of our daily partakings. It is not an isolated way of living—for as Shubha has marked above: the man smiles and eats too—that is to say, he is active and completes his earthly chores as he must, although he seems to be dormant and lethargic. He has but taken only one decision: to walk outside of the track that promotes egotistical competition, smallness and radical inequality among fellow creatures. The man joins forces with the rest of the human race in the last line. There is a dignified ascent, for the very mundaneness and monotony of eating and smiling are at once a chore and a possibility. He has not tuned in and opted for higher frequencies. His