The Feel of Not to Feel It (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited III)
Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011] “to compose is the verb applied to the making of poem” Along some seashore, sometime, we detect a young boy who, after working on a sand-castle for a whole day, goes on to destroy the same structure by the evening. Once gone, the sandy walls and turrets and moats of the castle are then barely distinguishable from the sand surrounding them. This routine, the idea of erring voluntarily, for Susan Stewart, shows “…a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making.” By annihilating the mere thing, the boy seems to be restituting the power of the form back to his own self, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorization or learning. Once the artistry used in making the castle in its entirety was internalized, the same set of skills was set to be used again: “Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements, that is, to its pure potential.” How free is the artist in making? How far can human action, circumscribed by divinity, nature and history, be free in order to fashion itself, so that it can choose to make? Freedom, for Stewart is an act of affirmation. Humans are living, willing intelligences, and hence, their freedom to make and act arises out of their interaction with the wider world. For example, Schelling bequeaths us with a notion of a consciousness that emerged in nature; prior to existence proper.And a felt sense of peril is part of a certain kind of freedom. So, Schelling describes the free person as a dizzy man poised on a precipice who has a desire to jump into the abyss. In order to make, one must be “…mortified in all his ownhood, for which reason he must almost necessarily attempt to step out of it and into the periphery, in order to seek rest there for his selfhood.” This relay race between unmaking and making is what makes art a process of continual beginnings.’ Susan Stewart’s works (I am also thinking of The Fate of the Senses and On Longing) are testaments to a powerful definition of the act of poetic making, a definition that she builds up painstakingly in this classic work too. The relay between making and breaking and a gradual building up and reaching to our readers and interlocutors about our apprehension of the world through metaphors are recurring openings for her: “… art as a summons to apprehension—to call, to speak, to hear, to touch—reveal the etymology of aesthetics in sense experiences. Whether we are reflecting on our own artistic practice or the works of others, our freedom in aesthetic activity is exercised as well in the interpretive task of receiving finite forms, imputing intention and purposiveness to them and then our jarred and anxious apprehensions are transferred along the lines of face-to-face encounters with other persons.” Absorption is a release. Only through art therefore are free associations of an open future formed. Thanksgiving/praise is the oldest mode that keeps the relay going. The most fundamental act of artistic making is the act of creating value by praising. Praise is the poet’s obligation of naming, judging, withholding, and giving. Indeed, human praise cannot approach the scale of the gods, but humans can praise with things they have made—things that are an accomplishment of generations who have practiced and refined their mastery over materials. We are thunderstruck by the ancient crafts of the rope-maker and the potter. The devices of yoking, binding, and containing—devices that run through all weaving, printing, painting, molding, and sculpting foremost leave us awed. These objects thereby hold the forces of heart, tongue, hand, and eye that were involved in their own making. Hence praise. And praise is judgment. Praise travels from praising specific objects in their respective milieus to praising creation itself by means of forms and modes of praise that will praise the praiser—the one who has mastered these epideictic forms. A certain relation between making and being follows this reflexive turn from the qualities of objects to the qualities of expression. In praise judgment is not linked to deliberative thought or appetite or other desires to possess and consume. One purely judges the integrity of the form, an appreciation that follows contemplation. Praise is not wrested from the world but drawn from within. Since it is given, it also may be withheld. The oldest public forms of praise are sung. As we know from the Hebrew psalms, what is surrendered in praise is sound—praise is sounded by speech and singing, by the “joyful noises” of lyres, timbals, and drums, and by the human drums of clapping and rhythmic shouting. Such sounding emphasizes all the more that there are no restrictions on praise’s production and no restrictions on its distribution. What is sent out returns not only concretely but also in multiple form: like the psalmist declares in Psalm 34, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”The volitional nature of praise lies in its being freely, liberally, and continually offered and drawn from the energies of the person who praises. Allen Ginsberg in Kaddish writes: “Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death.” And Stewart reads these lines by relating it to the freedom of making: “Ginsberg brilliantly weaves the querying, death-obsessed thoughts of the mourner into the dignified unfolding lines of the prayer until the prayer seems to speak as the voiceover that the lyric “I” once was. The incongruity of the mourner’s kaddish, like the punctuation of experience and suffering exemplified in the progress of the Psalms, returns us to the sheer inutility of praise—its freedom from
Precarity against Heroic Virility: Ramkumar Chetankranti’s Veerta Par Vichlit
Prasanta Chakravarty “पावर में एक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी” ~ आर. चेतनक्रांति (There was but one lack in power, despondency terrified it) ~ R. Chetankranti “Who will say, and in which language, the distance between two bodies?” ~Fernand Deligny Contemporary forms of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unequal political conditions mean encountering new ways of social-existential vulnerability in daily living. The concept of political precariousness—sometimes called precarity— especially in contemporary settings, involves instability, lack of livelihood protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability or some combination of these factors. The pervasiveness of precarity is coterminous to the rise of the powerful fascist forces which have spawned across the world, forces which are able to sell the claim that they will be able to address and mitigate such economic and political inequality with greater efficacy than the previous regimes. Their violent and masculinist ways are supposed to take whole nations into a new era of civilizational self-realization. Given such heroic and grandiose right-wing claims, what kind of realities are we actually witnessing at the ground level in a country like India, especially in the urban and semi-urban centres, where labour is radically being informalized and all forms of collective bargaining thwarted? Who are the teeming multitudes in our towns and cities now? What kind of conditions are they arriving from and what are their expectations and ideas of success in a virile, developing nation? What new biological life-forms and relations might develop in the midst of such precarious social existence? On the other hand, to be precarious also denotes an ontological condition. It constitutes a primary form of reciprocal vulnerability to and with our closest interlocutors—lovers and comrades, childhood friends and colleagues—relations from which we cannot will away without ceasing to be creatures of feeling and responsibility. Relational forms of precariousness—ineradicable fruits of human dependency— in fact, may well be the precursor to physical and social precarity or at least may be radically intertwined with the latter. Ramkumar Chetankranti’s long awaited second collection of poems—Veerta Par Vichlit, manages to do something quite incredible: collectively the poems are able to connect and combine our intimate dilemmas and existential vulnerability with a radical critique of the political, conspiratorial and grandiloquent configurations of right-wing masculinity. The latter, by means of intensifying new ways of social disquiet (instead of mitigating), hasten and nurture a kind of pallid and suffused social pathos all around us. This social pathos and anguish, in turn, play back into the hesitations of our inmost relations. This is where poetry can address our current social and material existence. In other words, Chetankranti’s poetic sensibility underscores the scars and bruises of our heightened, harried living —a kind of living that runs the risk of being assessed by history as a colossal endeavour in human hubris and futility. The Boys of Seelampur Have Turned Patriotic There is this mould. The boys of Seelampur (virtually a human scrapyard teeming with life) used to be hungry and unemployed in the days of yore. Disgruntled: with home, family, society and country. There was no blueprint for life. So, they would yawn and take to All India Radio, with nary a clue about whom or what the radio was babbling. School text-books seemed alien and distant. Teachers harrying. The studious ones, dazzling like fire-crackers in the mohalla, would be the boys’ target in every game they played. Education was high idealism—at best a means to bag a government job, a feat that the boys would not dream of ordinarily. Education, if any, was a default mechanism. Evenings would be spent watching feature films at the neighbour’s. And a huge door of fantasy would beckon—which they would bolt and unbolt for years. And then: फिर वह अंततः जब खुला और नब्बे का दशक मुहावरा बनने से पहले चार सौ साल पुरानी एक मस्जिद की धूल हवाओं को सौंप कर खिड़कियां खोलने में जुटा वे अपने अंधेरों से ऊब चुके थे फिर रोशनी हुई सब तरफ़ उजाला सब साफ़ दिखने लगा यह भी की जिन स्वार्थों को बल्लियों पर टांगकर दुर्लभ कर दिया गया था सबके लिए प्राप्य थे जिन्हे धर्मग्रन्थ त्याज्य कहा करते थे वे भी And then, when that door finally opened The Nineties Before it turned into an idiom Got engaged in Unbolting its windows After broadcasting The dust particles Of a four hundred years old mosque To the winds The boys got bored With their darkness And then there was light Every direction beamed Everything was limpid Those desires which were Tied and nailed to the rafters And made rare Were available to everyone Even the ones Prohibited in the Scriptures It was the magic carpet moment for the boys of Seelampur. The horizon felt closer. The soul would unchain itself and the spine, once again, appeared upright. Every new day triumphantly announced that money was not such a bad thing after all. Love was not a sin. Nor was masturbation. Truth was beckoning. And truth was not scary. But the boys still felt ungendered and the mobile phone was not sufficient a toy to impart a sense of power. They wanted a sip of the nectar of virile masculinity that runs the world. In anger and retribution they left many a judge and minister, doctor and engineer rotting in the manholes. वीर्य और रक्त की बाल्टियां कन्धों पर टाँगे वे रात रात भर घूमते कामनाओं की तस्वीरें बनाते बसों, रेलों, पेशाबघरों में और पूलों के निचे लिख लिख छोड़ते रहे अपने सन्देश जिनका कोई जवाब उन तक नहीं पंहुचा Dangling buckets of semen and blood over their shoulders Night after night they would patrol Sketching landscapes of desire On buses, trains, pissing stations Scribbling down their message underneath flyovers The reply to which they never ever received The older language of sacrifice made no sense anymore. Power and machismo ruled. Motorcycles: the answer! (“On motorcycles, up the road, they come:/Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys ,/Until the
Songs from 26H: humanitiesunderground speaks to Moushumi Bhowmik, On Her New Album
Songs from 26H, Home recordings of Moushumi Bhowmik–with Oliver Weeks, Satyaki Banerjee and Sukanta Majumdar releases soon. After a long hiatus of fifteen years, this is Moushumi’s fourth album/audio essay. This is also the third production of Travelling Archive Records, which is a shared, ongoing journey, a shared space of listening. In this sense, this is an inclusive album, trying to record multiple voices within a sound-space. This, for Moushumi, is a political locus about an aesthetic journey. humanitiesunderground spoke to Moushumi recently about this forthcoming work, the idea of overlapping selves and threads, about an ongoing nurturing of a shared platform and also about the musical and archival transportations of this amorphous but growing collective into the future. Here is the audio recording of the interview: The album will be available on the February 11, 2017, 5:00 pm, at the Vivekananda Hall, Jadavpur University. Also available, upon inquiry, at info@thetravellingarchive.org and travellingarchiverecords@gmail.com. In Kolkata, the album will be available at Dhyanbindu (College Street), Abar Baithak (Jodhpur Park) and Cafe Kabira (Jadavpur). Delhi and Goa: People Tree. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, Chattagram: Batighar, Sylhet: Boipotro. London: Brick Lane Bookshop. Price: Rs. 400 _________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
A Hand Stitched Piece of Tapestry
_________________________________ [HUG speaks to Sumanta Mukhopadhyay on his recent compilation of Pranabendu Dasgupta’s major poetry in two volumes (Saptarshi Publications, Kolkata, January 2016)] *** Prasanta: This is a signal work Sumanta. This a great reason to celebrate poetry—that you, with able help from others, have been able to now bring out a large part of Pranabendu Dasgupta’s poetical works, including quite a few unpublished poems, in such a systematic manner. A true labour of love. As you have said in your editor’s note that there seems to be conscious design in removing this poet of poets from our consciousness. He is no more in circulation for a whole new generation of readers in Bangla. Why has that happened and how can new readers have a gainful engagement with him with these two volumes? Sumanta:Thank you Prasanta. Thank you all who are attached to HUG. Keeping Indian poetry and world poetry in perspective one should read Pranabendu Dasgupta and HUG is providing that space for us. Do you think I have done this in a systematic manner? Not at all. In our language if you want to edit a collected book of poems you have almost nothing in your hand unless you are working with a poet like Bhaskar Chakraborty who kept every single detail of his own poetic journey in his personal archive or a poet like Joy Goswami, who can recall from memory almost the entire story of his time, in its diverse trajectories, or a rare Sankha Ghosh who whispers the journey of Gandhyarbo or Panjore Danrer Sabdo on some clouded evening. For Pranabendu I had nothing! No diaries, No personal account, not even his writings after 2003(His last collection Roudrer Nakhore was published in 2003). I have no idea how many unpublished and uncollected poems are still left behind. I feel sad when I think about him suffering for his sanity, concentrating deeply on a single poem, and a lonely man with no one by his side. I can still remember one of our renowned professors, one of his colleagues at Jadavpur University, shouting at him: “You get out from here.” Some of his fellow poets mocking at him: “All his disease would be over; give him an award.” Or: “When he comes visiting me, I pretend to be asleep”. It was and is a cruel world. Yes, it is depressing. But still he tried. I had to go through all available little magazines for every single line. I tried to do it systematically but I could not. Let us come to the next part of your question, Prasanta. I have written that the silent process of an annihilation could easily be understood but I did not mention the reason. It is quite difficult to figure it out. Like mist you can feel its presence but won’t be able to hold it by the scruff of the neck! Evidences are everywhere but the reason invisible. New readership hopefully shall feel the touch of an unfelt breeze and a completely new perception of the troubled time by reading his long untouched poems. Nobody has expressed it quite like him. Prasanta: Let me start with one of Pranabendu’s observations in his short prose piece titled Poetry and I. “If I do not hear and absorb the inner turns and rhythms of Bangla language for some time, I am unable to compose poetry.” How does this inner voice and rhythm reflect in Pranabendu’s poetry? Does that evolve? Sumanta: Of course that does! Look, he has written that small prose work in 1980 and he talked about the inner pulse of Bengali language rather the inner turn as you have interpreted. I would like to emphasise on the time: because the entire turbulence of 70s has created many inner turns in Bengali language which you never overtly find in his poems. But he was talking about the language as a living body. How it vibrates inside your existence and how you react physically to the rhythm. I must declare one thing here. Pranabendu did mention his inability in the context of his second book— that he could not write Bengali poems in America, but the fact was something else. He tried to write in English! I have seen one such poem in a university journal, autographed by Robert Frost too. That volume must have been taken to Frost for his signature. (during those days he used to come to the university students for some fresh air; 1962 it was!) Frost signed under the poem with these words: ‘miles to go before I sleep’. So it must have been quite a complex history…this issue of language. We ought to track it later. Prasanta:Let us talk about his first collection “A Season”—18 poems in total. More than symbols, this collection is about a large ambit of philosophic breadth. There is also a musical consciousness in this collection, a sense of the classical world? Can you please tell us more? Sumanta: I have tried to mention all this in my notes. But, yes of course there is more to it. I personally think that Pranabendu started his career with a complex understanding of what constitutes song (music, if you like) and as his career grew he shifted towards visual images. The history of Bengali poetry I personally think is a history of negotiations with music in particular. I am talking about its form. Pranabendu, like his all fellow poets, started with a new sense of music in his mind. Remember Alokranjan Dasgupta’s remarkable research “Lyric in Indian Poetry”? If you delve deeper into the history of those days you would be surprised to find a musical consciousness was in the air, deeply entrenched. Everyone of them tried their own tune, so to say. It has nothing to do with the classical world. For Alokeranjan, it was “Jouban Baul”; for Sakti Chattopadhyay something else in “O Love, O Silence”. Actually,it was Buddhadeb Bosu who created a new meaning of ‘Song’ in his translation