Free Me From The Poet’s Prison
This is the translated version of an exchange between poet Rana Roychowdhury and Surajit Sen, published in Desher Agamikaal magazine in March, 2016. Rana Roychowdhury is one of the most understated, elemental and rebellious of contemporary poets from Bengal. HUG has published a short selection of his translated poems in January 2014: ——————————— Surajit Sen:Why did you begin to write poetry? And why still continue? Rana Roychowdhury: At one point I used to recite poetry at my home, on my own. At around thirteen or fourteen years of age. Actually, this habit, or ill-habit shall we say, I had been nurturing since my school days. All alone at home, I used to recite Nazrul Islam’s poetry aloud. At that time we used have a rural existence. Our village house was large and empty and when I used to recite, the sound would echo. That used to give me a kick. No one would hear me recite, of course. Then there was this obsession to take part in local recitation competitions. Often I would forget poems midway. And every time I would return rich with the consoling words of the judges! So, I realized that such a skill was not my cup of tea. But as I would recite, there gradually began to blossom a love for poetry itself. But I could not compose poetry. Sometimes I would read Shakti Chattopadhyaya’s poetry and would try to emulate him. Complete failure, that venture. I realized one cannot write with some definitive role model in mind. Whatever one feels, one has to pen that down. At one point some lines looked to be taking the shape of a poem. So I began sending them to magazines here and there. My first poem was published in a magazine from Agarpara. Alongside write-ups on Uttamkumar and interviews with Aparna Sen, my poems also got published. That is how it all started. Now it has turned into a kind of a habit—this writing. Not exactly a habit—actually I get a lot of happiness and satisfaction by writing poetry. S: What kind of reactions do you receive from the reader? R:Some utter kind words. Others abuse. Someone said: “Reading your poems, it feels you are sick. The amount of crap you write it makes me nauseated.” Others remain silent (such silence is like mourning). These days though, many seek poetry. Earlier no one used to ask. Only two magazines would publish my poetry-Dahopatro and Natmandir. I was at peace with myself. These days more of my poems get published, and I am not exactly satisfied with such compositions. S:Teaching in a school and writing poetry in Bangla—how did you end up aligning your life to such a classical lattice and frame? One that comes down to us right from the time of that arche teacher—Kobishekhar Kalidas Roy. R:Never thought that I will become a school teacher. All I used to do was join and partake in adda sessions in the local community club with friends. I got involved in some social work. Helping arrange medicine banks for the needy or procuring and distributing clothes during the Durga puja from Harisha Market or organizing blood donation camps or local festivities—these were the things I would spend my time in. Life was sheer vagabondage. Only hope was Ma’s hotel, since my father passed away long ago. Ma used to teach in a school. Never ever in my worst nightmare did I then envisage myself as a school-teacher. There is no relation between this teaching and my poetry. Both are independent streams. I am two different individuals in each of these vocations. But I teach kids. So, when I do engage with them I do not feel like a teacher. I feel that I am the father and guardian of these little ones—a strange love for these souls envelop me. It is difficult to describe this phenomenon—but even as I teach them, I discover poetry, glean it. That kind of poetry is timeless. S:But how did you become one, I mean: a poet? R: Yes, I am coming to that. But first: let me tell you what I used to do before I was a teacher. I was lucky to land a job. Someone helped me procure a job in a private firm. In that concern, I have worked for twelve years in two installments. For that I still receive a pension of Rs. 844/-. It became very difficult for me to work there. My immediate boss used to be very rude with me. I used to work in the accounts section and then he used to give very tough assignments which I could not do. My wicked boss used to misbehave and humiliate me since I could not do those chores. One day he said: “Tut tut, can a goat ever till the land?” I protested at that. Anyway, I had to periodically pay visits to the bank for office work. One had to wait there for long stretches of time. One day, waiting at Canara Bank on Camac Street, I started scribbling lines on the bank withdrawal slip, which had eventually become the poem “Jadavpur Mor”. I soon joined as a proof-reader in Aajkal newspaper. I did my job with diligence and so others, burdening me with extra work, would often step out for adda and smoking sessions. Ekram Ali da would sometimes indulge me by asking me write for that newspaper. For such sprees, I even got scolded once by Sandipan Chattopadhaya. He said: “See here is a letter against you. You have abused sundry people in your writing. Now you manage.” So, I had to compose a letter as a reply which made Sandipan immensely happy. Ekram da said—“You have a flair for prose” and so on. Thereafter I used to write there often. Had received some odd praise too. During that period I used to engage myself in both poetry and prose. And then I lost my mother—it was 1997. Since
Fists That Turn Like Keys
Aishwarya Iyer __________________ [1] Splitting Seed How often must we arise from this seed Yellow, nutted, moon-spent, tree-withered, The seed splits and leaves climb out, thus flow tears, Time spreads like disease, the swell of mood hangs Over split seed— Hands, legs, tongue, hair—bodies roam about in space The city is abluster, automobiles now have faces, The city where eyes wander, where stones are broken, Where language has no home: ‘Drive Slow’, ‘Kanti Sweets’, ‘Herculean Builders’, ‘Pasta Street’; the city where the hand betrays the leg, the mouth betrays the eye, where the ground breaks like seed, but nothing climbs out, thus flow tears— Between us great distances hang in the smallest of words: ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘of course’; sometimes dictionaries are the end of meaning; the garbage dump got cleared; we ache to know wherefrom we speak; how often must we arise from this seed? Afternoon flows out of the sun’s tongue: the day is some kind of speech. *** [2] Iggalur, or Far from the City The fields are woven from hands, air, water and sun, The eyes of stalks gleam in the afternoon The trunks of trees offer vertical hold Far from the city, from the sleep of human beings, Time goes into the body of plants So full is this passage that night too is left undreamt Time is eaten—and plants grow. *** [3] After Paul Celan Keep your words married to their sense, the sense married to absence. Don’t lead them too far astray, hollowed, searching for their point of emergence. But if they search for their shadows, let them, for shadows are what bind them to breath. A word is a stone without its breath. *** [4] Meeting A meeting like one where the sky and earth meet is illusory, we all know The sky and earth walk together in their meeting Their meeting being a not-meeting; Our bodies are held in curtains: The azaan, the temple bells, the chants next door leave a gold rush that is too bright on them. Our bodies, when they meet, must walk together The legs with legs Hands with hands My language cupped in yours— That gold dust torn off must envelop us in a far circle Minting fresh moments like chants. No, our bodies shall not chime, they shall not sing They shall not announce any god Like the blush of sky and earth in embrace at sunset Our bodies will shiver warm at the passing of time Mark day and night, become sun and moon. They shall be held in curtains too. *** [5] Make Time Make time Make time from the joyous tinny screams of children Bathing in afternoon sun Sew time from the leaves holding out to the afternoon Belting the terraces of low houses Rising like invisible ears The crow looks askance. The truth is here. Make space for the shearing of time The glass-pulp of action froths to the top The dove that floated in its sky will be lost *** [6] Scene from a First-floor Window Over the treetops comes a surge that swallows the eyesight of dreamers The construction workers have wet their feet in ditch water; one lights a cigarette and launches into a tale for the other They sit on a slab and wait for the afternoon darkness to bleed; the koel has come visiting, but you almost forget to hear her, the green of the trees runs into her voice; The rattle of implements has a sharper sting; clotheslines become forlorn and balconies begin to be besieged; The earth had been asking her due with iron stillness Now way’s made to cure her of her bitter agony. *** [7] We are in flames… We are in flames Very often the evening spars And the night is a cauldron for little fires The splinters come from everywhere Sparks dripping about the construction worker The crackling voices of playing children The television makes other fires in homes; You and I are hands aclap Your words are fists that turn like keys The locks are between us. *** [8] Name And that blesséd word with no meaning—who will utter it? —Agha Shahid Ali stars vanishing into nothingness stop and turn back to participate in the utterance of your name that becomes the element of time your name breaks into numerous syllables and with it brings suffering to sound the stars race against the shatter, against time, holding your name together your name engulfs the splicing of days the morning, a dewdrop from your name the night, a pod for your name your name bristles under the earth leaving the ground groundless far from the concert of stars fall crystals of duration hours and days spent in your name *** [9] Flesh Which kind of flesh have you found pierced in the encounter? You and I, suppurating leaves falling from a naked tree Cut off, with blood sap We were never joined, and now finding our midribs in line Our flesh disappears, the green grows distant We have grown eyes __________________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Discrimination No Representation: Modernity & Plato
Rahul Govind ________________ Plato is one among the many unfortunate philosophers who are referred to more and more, read less and less. To this atrophied forgetting, Abrogast Scmitt’s Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality is a patient therapeutic mnemonic. Over 500 pages of closely argued text ambitiously proposes a fundamental critique of modernity, and its self-conceptions, in the light of a rigorous reading of Plato, and what Schmitt names the Plato-Aristotelian tradition (henceforth P-A). In the course of such a reading, the familiar clichés of the ‘theory of forms’, that orient not only Philosophy but also the humanities and the social sciences, are laid to rest. What strikes one first about Modernity and Plato is that it is simultaneously, a monumental historical diagnosis, a subtle and nuanced philosophical analysis, as well as a courageous conceptual thesis. The text is structured in terms of a series of conceptual propositions that are then extrapolated and established through various kinds of readings; some of which are detailed and pertain to key sections of the referred to canonical works. It integrates and goes on to transform themes that are conventionally kept distinct, such as the conceptual and the aesthetic. One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is the frequent illustration of the argument through everyday examples that seamlessly expresses, rather than attenuates, the rigour of philosophical labour. The singular voice that speaks through the text does so with an originality and spirit that is untrammelled by the jargon of thought. To get to the thesis that is never lost sight of. Schmitt argues that what is conventionally taken to be modernity, notwithstanding the debates around date and place, is characterized by a particular consciousness that believes itself to be at once “original and unique” (4)[i]. From the period conventionally designated as the Renaissance we find evidence of an attitude that “degraded” it’s immediate past not only in the specific domains of the fine arts, but on the more general registers of philosophical and scientific aptitude. Self proclaimed superiority of the latter lay in the ostensibly more exact understanding of the objects of the world in visual (artistic) and scientific (philosophical) ways. Thus a particular understanding of the function of art – a representation that was to replicate an individuated empirical experience of the world – was construed to be the essential characterization of art as such. Schmitt argues that there were deeper roots to this understanding and valuation of the world; roots that could be traced to the nominalists and the specific rehabilitation of a specific Hellenistic/Stoic philosophic thesis at the cost of the P-A tradition. Modernity, in following the former, foregrounds the individual object as immaculately received, making the infinite (and doomed) task of knowledge, to be one of faithful representation. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of Duns Scotus’s interpretation of Aristotle. Schmitt forcefully argues that this interpretation was in fact a radical misunderstanding of Aristotle in particular; but also simultaneously a profoundly debilitating misunderstanding of the whole P-A tradition that persists to this day in academic and more mainstream discourse. In his own reading of Aristotle, knowledge begins with perception (never without its own cognitive dimension), and yet, to (truly) know that which we perceive, we require a conceptual clarification which is the true knowledge of the object and its (sensory) properties. On the other hand, for Scotus, that which was arrived at through intellectual cognition is in fact truly something that is to have been already given to us in the “immediate intuition of the object”. The question and difference thus revolves around the status and making of the “individual object”. In Aristotle via Schmitt, intellect brings about unity among moments isolated by the mind-sense organs, with cognition taking place in a single act. There can be no clear ‘reception’ of the individual object, because such individuation requires the conceptual discrimination between what is essential and what is not. The circle drawn by chalk, is given as an example, one that is constantly returned to. Only a conceptual clarification can define the circle as having an essential characteristic property i.e. all distances from the perimeter to the centre are equal. This property is to be distinguished from the color white of the chalk that also might characterize the given circle. Such a distinction is involved in the conceptual act as a unifying and distinguishing operation in so far as it presents an individuated object: color of chalk and roundess along with other properties in the circle. Scotus’s major intervention lies in the fact that the function of “intelligence” — or conceptual analysis as a concrete distinguishing act — as it existed in Aristotle is elided and the unity of the object is said to lie in the object itself combined with the act of intuition i.e. perception and intellect. Reason is now assigned the function of distinguishing the parts in terms of an already given or received unity. Thus, reason/conceptualization is to be found (already) in intuition, which is itself dependent on the “individual object” that “includes all that can be found in terms of intellectual determination in every higher instance thereof”. The nature of conceptual clarification or analysis to be found in Aristotle has here been radically altered because in Scotus, such conceptualization (or thought) is now to be understood merely as a form of representation, and is only able to work ‘deficiently’ i.e. retrospectively ascertain or represent the object that is to be in itself (as a unity) already found in intuition. This construal of the individual object is what Schmitt characterizes as the “metaphysical overload of the individual object”. Thought is construed as always secondary while the individual object as it is experienced is endowed with a primary and foundational role. It is reduced to an exclusively “representative” character, a fundamental move that will later lead to the more recognizable contemporary distinctions and between the conscious (thought) and the unconscious. (22 – 30)[ii] The active function of thinking in the constitution of
Avinash Mishra: A Governing Tone of Stoic Regression
HUG ______ जो अकेला है उसे और डर दीजिए जो प्रतिबद्ध है उसे और उदासीनता दीजिए जो भूखा है उसे और नारे दीजिए जो सताया हुआ है उसे और अवसाद दीजिए जो हत्यारा है उसे और समर्थन दीजिए जो छीन सकता है उसे और ताकत दीजिए जो पिछड़ा है उसे और आरक्षण दीजिए To the solitary Give more fear To the committed Give more nonchalance To the hungry Give more slogans To the afflicted Give more ennui To the killer Give more reinforcement To the marauder Give more muscle To the backward Give more reservation Such eloquence is like gold dust shining beneath a silvery eddying river.But a most perilous eloquence.Here is a transitional move in contemporary Hindi poetry. In the times of shrill and settled regimens of social polarization, a serrated, reckless bit of aristocratic dissociation; a proud distancing that has escalating regression inbuilt into its mood and structure. What is the aesthetic problematique here? What relations of forces joust? What concealed morality is violently unearthed by effecting a satirical reversal at the end? The primordial elements in music are balefully unconcerned about human predilections. The forces of willed nature hover around: fear and indifference, pleadings and a cultivation of ennui, creaturely cruelty is soaked in the unleashing of raw power. And then a conceptual chiasmus, an intrusion of the social by naming and satirizing the one that cannot be touched in progressive circles: affirmative action and social reservation. Or is it that this ironical reversal is already thought out before the very structure of the poem is laid bare? Can social satire withstand the weight of a vital aesthetic principle? Is the force and power of a new poetic principle arriving with a terrible regressive potential—a reminder of the banality and treachery done to art in the name of social commitment in Hindi poetry writing since the 1970s, which can only be purged so violently? Who decides the limits of poetic expression? The wise, committed masters keep a leash on what can be said and what must be left untouched. And the lid is blown away by such violent satire. We are stunned by the starkness of the move. There is no metaphysical comfort in acts and conducts but rather a logical progression to the limits of all that is intrinsic and primordial. Movement I—Fear and Aloofness: जो अकेला है उसे और डर दीजिए जो प्रतिबद्ध है उसे और उदासीनता दीजिए The vision is unforgiving and hence it arrives with a possibility of transfiguring art. All pathological discharge—dismay and dread, fear and trepidation—must be thrown to the wind. A heroic egoism is at play here.By acknowledging fear as a primary motivating force man usually rationalizes his life. He takes the first step towards security. Which is another name for society. But primal forms of fear—a hunch that life is not worth living or the fear of eventual obliteration—such stirrings could elicit other emotions.If one does not come to a contractual transaction with fear, there are only two options: either give oneself willfully and masochistically to fear’s demands. Or transcend it by summoning a self conscious subjective force—“Pour on. I will endure” as Lear declared to the invading storm. Yes, testing forms of courage must be inundated with the pelting ways of pitiless fear.That is the only route by which the scale of commitment can turn minimally moral. Moral courage is a commitment that fundamentally smirks at virtue. It takes in fear differently. In the face of capricious heavenly wrath, the initial reflex reaction is bewilderment. Faced with the calamitous forces of nature perhaps, our very creaturely fibers shake to their foundation. We could transfer bewilderment into trembling, like a guilty thing surprised—as Kierkegaard guides us in Fear and Trembling. Abjectness in that case presupposes submission. The obverse is to swim along with the forces. In the face of intimidating evil an ego, a principle stands forth. The willed individual seeks vile and ingratitudinous bouts of fear so that he can summon moral courage. This way lies freedom. Solitude before all else. And solitude is the original commitment. Commitment is not an aim. It is a resolve to shun all that is available. And such are the times that every bit of our existence is being made available—primarily radicalism. Social commitment, as and within available forms of solidarities, is only worth relinquishing. There is no benediction. Commitment is pure phlegm. The rigour of nonchalance is a punishing form of commitment. The power of aloofness is not disinterestedness, but its obverse. Detachment could give you poise but it could also give you an original form of irresponsibility which is vital for cultivating commitment. Indifference and recklessness make one fearless. Fearless to the routine forms of corporatism and other specializations of partiality. “L’art, mes enfants, c’est d’tre absolument soi-meme,” wrote Paul Verlaine. By “absolument soi-meme” he meant the transcendent subjectivity, not the ego. The absolute self in poetry is what creates and responds to rhyme and meter, the sensual and the expressive. Only the poet himself: as a reckless classical aesthetic principle, as a detached vocation, is the only one who is able to shun all tailor made sources of busy involvement.His objective ego is yet not systematized into prejudgment and prescription. This mood, such startling militancy, is transitional in Hindi poetry of our times. Movement II—Slogans and Ennui: जो भूखा है उसे और नारे दीजिए जो सताया हुआ है उसे और अवसाद दीजिए The first inklings of irony. Sloganeering is a travesty of solidarity. It is an egotistic move, a daily routine. The slogan, in its originary intention, is supposed to be a memorable motto. The slogan’s power is in its repetitive force. It could be chant in a clan-ceremony or a war cry of militia. There is a rhetorical nature (the form) and a unified purpose (the social expression) to every slogan. In earlier times they were utilized primarily as passwords to insure proper recognition of individuals at night or in the confusion of battles. Progressive