Malayaj, A Letter: The Poet of Habit & the Poet of Collision
Malayaj: A Letter _______________ 2-4-1971 To: Sri Rameshchandra Shah 3/2, Professor’s Colony Vidha Vihar Bhopal 462002 Dear Ramesh Bhai, Your letter has arrived “hale and hearty”. I am sending another letter to Jyotsna-ji along with this mail. The kind of uncivilized behavior that I had indulged in earlier by not writing to her may be remedied a little by this note. Dearest friend of mine, I did not yet receive the book, the survey of international literature. Perhaps it is lost in transit. I also could not detect ‘Kalpana’ in any of the stalls here and hence could not take a look at it. Pray, who has conducted the survey? And what were the main arguments? Actually, Hindi journals and magazines these days are so full of levity that it is impossible to nurture a literary ambience of response and counter-response, analytical survey and response to such reports. Much work is left undone just because there is no such clime and ambience. For instance, suppose you wish to write a good response to that light and frivolous report by Chandrakant Devtale in ‘Filhaal’, you have no avenue. Where will you send your piece? Isn’t that a problem? About Filhaal I fully trust your opinion. I could have written a piece in ‘Dinmaan’ about Filhaal but one can see that Sarveshwarji is extremely enamoured of Ashok with certain old baggage. That becomes apparent from his unfair characterization of that magazine in his recent comments. Let me now come to the content of your letter. I am happy that you took up my cue about the Agyeya versus Muktibodh issue. After having completed my writing, for a few days now I have been thinking about the accomplishments and personality of Agyeya. Much of that on the same lines as you have suggested too. True, the Hindi-wallahs have turned completely ingrate! You are perhaps not surprised that there is very little or no reaction to my essay. The mujahedeens of the Muktibodh camp must have underlined my name in the black register. One can howl and cry on this one too, just like Ashok has done in Filhaal about the departure of certain values. I am only reassured by the fact that there are still people like you around who understand the nuances of our material conditions. I am truly indebted to you for the valuable thoughts that you have on my writing. And the way you have been thinking about Agyeya’s prose and poesy—that adds a new dimension to Agyeya scholarship. My friend, please write about this issue in detailed fashion in the future. This your statement, for instance, is full of rare insight I feel: “After experiencing the movement of his sensibility in prose, he seemed to gain more breath. So when he came back to verse, that became somewhat more answering to his needs.” In these two sentences one may detect a new way of looking, a fresh method, in Agyeya scholarship. You have rightly pointed out to the historical necessity of Agyeya’s arrival on the literary scene, and the way he provided an intellectual direction to writing also was the demand of the times. Then you mention a certain sophistication in his diction—this is something I did not write about. So aptly put. My suggestion is that please do not let go of these thoughts about Agyeya in those 15 pages. Consider these pages as early notes for a fuller and larger work on the man and his writings. Particularly this issue about his prose-poetry demands a fuller and longer discussion. I have so far gone twice through the piece on the creative impulse of feelings. With love. So many things come to my mind. Where do I even begin? It is a living, throbbing piece; hence it has touched me so much at so many levels. There are a few things in my mind as an aside right now. Shamsher’s poetic persona is an enigmatic one. That is the reason everyone is so eager to gauge his work and style. Perhaps the personality of Shamsher, much like Nirala, is the most enigmatic and self-contradictory in the Hindi writing world. I feel that there is a difference between self-contradiction and inner-turmoil. One can see that there are many contradictory applications and theorems that Shamsher wants to connect in his writings. For instance, asti and nasti, that which is and that which is not. This I am painting with a broad brush but this can be explained with examples from his work. Is there such self-contradiction in Agyeya too? There are clashes about philosophies in his writings, no doubt. But that is not a battle between affirmation and negation. Rather, the problem of consistency is a characteristic of Agyeya, not of Shamsher. Your chief thesis about the poet-personality of Shamsher is that owing to his habitual character he was steadily moving towards equitability in aesthetic tone and consistency of a kind. This observation, I feel, is more germane to Agyeya. Whether Shamsher had progressed towards equitability of taste may be debatable but surely Agyeya had been moving towards such a goal with his intelligence and judgments. In this context, isn’t your comment that indulging in thought leads to clarity and a searching mentality not a simplified generality? I completely agree that Shamsher does not tackle his subject in its full complexity but rather chooses a safe corner of self enclosed mutinous art. But is that only because in his writings there is little clash between thought and feeling? There is a different kind of clash which takes him towards another kind of intricate and unsafe form of art: that is the collision between one end of feeling and the other end. The affirmative and the negative strains are part of the same stream of a felt-process. Not thought process but the two aspects of the felt-form. One has to read Shamsher’s surrealistic poems in order to appreciate this collision, where he altogether abandons the known linguistic
In This Mind I Stay, In that Mind I Keep
Jahir Hasan ______________ ash anyone, ash? ___________ that-house, I take a picture then I enter it. its resident beast emerges. i set ablaze the house. in that burning pyre I drop the picture of the house in this way ash is born of thin air all ash therefore is picture the ash-carrier’s heart is heavy ash anybody, ash? ছাই নিবেন গো ছাই ____________ সে-ঘরের ছবি তুলি। তার পর সেই ঘরে ঢুকি। বার হই ঘরের জানোয়ারটা। পোড়াই ঘরেরে। ঘরের আগুনে ছাড়ি ঘরের ছবিটা। ছাই এই ভাবে বাতাসের মধ্যে পয়দায় সব ছাই তাই ছবি ছাই বাহকের মন ভালো নাই। ছা্ই, ছাই নিবেন গো ছাই! *** with regard to language tilling at arshi-nagar ____________________________________ when i lean toward you and when i don’t both are me but who do you love more? the sugarcane farmers don’t kiss after all drowned in sugarcane sap they do not wish to lose themselves. the i before the kiss and the i just after reside so close yet have not the two met, has not one ever witnessed the other’s circus? আরশি নগরের ভাষার চাষ বিষয়ে _____________________ যখন তোমার দিকে কাত হই, যখন হই না- এই দুইজনই আমি কিন্তু কারে বেশি ভালোবাসো তুমি? আখচাষীরা তো চুমা খায় না। আখের রসে অটল হারাইতে চায় না তারা! চুমার আগের আমির সাথে চুমার পরের আমির এত কাছাকাছি বাস তবু দেখা হয় নাই নাকি, দেখে নাই একজনা কভু আরেকজনের সার্কাস? *** wind, where have you disappeared? ____________________________ the magician, from within the ear, shall conjure an elephant, so i await white rice on the plate nowshall fry and eat some brinjal chunks, i await awaiting dubai dough from my son with that, ah, to die after devouring a hilsa huge in the debdaru tree near the graveyard that bulbuli’s self-crafted song i have smeared my face with holding it up so that it does not slough clumsy into the bog let the wind come dancing, by and by on its back shall i slowly let adrift the song… বাতাস কই গেলা ___________ জাদুকর কানের ভিতর থাকি হাতি বার করবেনে তাই বসি আছি সাদা ভাত পাতে বেগুনের চাক ভাজি খাবো, বসি আছি দুবাইয়ে ছেলের টাকার আশায়- দেড় কেজি ওজনের ইলিশ খাইয়েই মরবানে! কবর খানার কাছে দেবদারু গাছে বুলবুলির স্বরচিত গানটা সারা মুখে মাখি কায়দায় থামায়ে রাখছি কাদার উপর যেন বেকায়দায় না পড়ে! বাতাস নাচতে নাচতে আসুক তার পিঠে আস্তে ছেড়ে দিবোনে ! *** what i shall not dream tonight _____________________ unknown station. fog filled. road desolate. the train-driver is old, he can’t even find his own train. it would seem, there, there… at a distance, buried in the fog ambivalent isn’t that a girl weeping to her heart’s content! স্বপ্নে আজ যা দেখব না _______________ অচেনা স্টেশন। কুয়াশায় ভরা। রাস্তা খালি। ট্রেন ড্রাইভার বুড়া, তার নিজের ট্রেনই খুইজে পাইতেছে না! মনে হবে বার বার, হুদাই হুদাই দূরে কুয়াশার গভীরে অনির্ণেয় একটা মেয়ে মন ভরি কাঁদতেছে না ! *** a child’s lament about the grave _________________________ that is a child’s grave he is refusing to accept the system of graves he is trying to come out to play, towards this world he has no idea that a grave stockpiles everything the angel appears, as if enquires: why so restive, why do you regret? here are playing grounds galore try as many fixtures as you wish every sport under the sun nigh that garden of palms never in million years should you ask that ancient greybeard what time it is here! কবর বিষয়ে শিশুর আক্ষেপ __________________ এই কবরটা একটা শিশুর ও মানতে চাচ্ছে না কবরের সিস্টেম ও বার হই আসতেছে খেলবে কইয়ে দুনিয়ার দিকে কবরের ভিতর সব আছে ও জানত না ফেরেশতা আসে, যেন জিগায় তুমি ছটফট কেন, আপশোচ করতেছ কেন? খেলার মাঠ হ্যানে বহুত আছে যাও কত পদে তুমি খেলবা সব খেলাই আছে ঐ খেজুর বাগানের কাছে ঐ বসা বুইড়ারে ভুলেও জিগাইনা এইখানে কটা বাজে! *** grave, rain ________ lightning streak, as if a woman, such tenderness one feels the cloud is the grave still that grave crumples, drizzles! distant district, rain awash, homeless insect, numb shadows flicker within crannies of the comb’s tooth silence visits in a little while rain, rain pours on beneath the rind and bark, unstoppable down to the roots of grass, as if no letter arrives has it been buried by the rain? sorrow besieges my brother’s grave! কবর, বৃষ্টি ______ বিদ্যুৎরেখা, যেন মাইয়ে, ক্যান মায়া লাগে, মেঘেই সমাধি তবুও সমাধি ঝুরো হই ঝরি পড়ে! দূর জেলা, বৃষ্টি কবলিত, গৃহহীন কীট, স্তব্ধ ছায়া নড়ি উঠতেছে চিরুনির দাঁতের ফাঁকের মধ্যে নীরবতা একটু পরেই আসে বৃষ্টি নামি গেছে ছালবাকলের তল দিয়া, ঘাসের শিকড়ে থামে নাই, কোনো চিঠি নাই যেন বৃষ্টিতে দেবে কি গেছে মন মরা বাঁশতলে দাদার কবর ! *** memory of cosmos _______________ in my mind a beam-balance hangs all my cares, all weight I place there a park there a rivulet trees and birds that rivulet as if is an island they do not appear anytime, not always there the milky way seems wobbly i sit in a coffee shop the waiter arrives i drink coffee and think did I ever have anyone? as if there is no yesterday relentless this task in my beam-balance i measure its weight in this mind i stay in that mind i keep মহাকাশের স্মৃতি __________ আমার মনের মধ্যে একখান দাড়িপাল্লা ঝোলে মনের সকল ভার আমি তাতে রাখি সেইখানে পার্ক আছে ছোট নদী আছে গাছ পাখি আছে আবারও সে ছোট নদী আছে যেন এক দ্বীপ সেইটা তারা যন তন হয় না উদয় স্যানে ছায়াপথ নড়বড়ে মনে হয় সেইখানে একটা কফিশপে বসি আমি ওয়েটার আসে আমি কফি খাই আর ভাবি আমার কেউ কি ছিল মোর কোনো গতকাল যেন নাই মোর এই কাম একটানা দাড়িপাল্লা আমি মাপি তার ভার আমি এই মন থাকি যেন ওই মনে রাখি ! *** tidbit poem _________ from deep within my wallet, many a day later money-receipt of quantum foundation, blood red, at the blank obverse someone, in a hurry, has scribbled— 1. goodbye store 2. bath 3. moulana. 4. graveyard 5. milad 6. why was no. 6 blank? is
Goatfooted, Fatcheeked: Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams
Tight little alleyway – no room to squeeze between its walls – a young girl blocks my way, my rambles around Venice knocks me off my feet, the place, the come-on to a stranger’s eye, a wide canal my drifting takes me to. If you had girls like your canals, o Venice, cunts like little alleyways, you’d be the greatest city in the world. * what bothers me is this: the way Bettina gets to be so skillful every limb in her body grows looser & looser till she can stick her own little tongue up her own little cunt a charmer who tastes her own charms will soon lose all interest in men. * Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on. * Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me I take in my stride, as a god might command me. But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers: tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ. * Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself. * I could have made it just as well with boys although my thing has always been with girls. And once I get my satisfaction with a girl I can turn her around & have her as a boy. * Not schwanz meaning “tail” but some fancier word o Priapus me being a poet in German that word grinds me down. In Greek I can call you a phallos a marvelous sound to my ears and in Latin mentula from mens meaning “mind” another good word. But schwanz is something that sticks out from behind & back there isn’t where I find the most pleasure. * Stranger-man, come, let’s drink coffee! She says, and she means ‘let me wank you.’ So much for coffee, my friends, I’ve always hated the stuff. * In my long search for a wife, I kept picking up whores; in the end I Caught you, my dear little whore: now I have found me a wife! * Turn your toes up to heaven, my dear, and don’t worry! We reach up Heavenwards too with our hands, but not so innocently. * Urns and sarcophagi pagans paint into life, dancing fauns, dancing bands of bacchantes, bright lines of them, goatfooted, fatcheeked, squeeze sounds hot & wild through brass horns, percussions & cymbals blare out,: we see & hear on the marble birds beating wings, sweet taste of the fruit on your beaks, no noise to frighten you.off still less to drive Eros away who joins the bright crowds rejoicing, hoisting his torch. So bounty overcomes death & the ashes within in the house made of silence still find pleasure in life. Some day may the tomb of the poet be graced with this scroll he has richly bejewelled with life. *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Language of Flowers
Michael Taussig ________________ Asked on a radio interview a couple of years back why he drew animals and not people, the great cartoonist Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner fame replied: “It’s easier to humanize animals than humanize humans.” Recently the Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria gave this a twist. Reacting against the stupendous violence in his country, he humanized flowers by photographing them like botanical specimens, replacing the stems, leaves, flowers, and berries with what look like human bones. He called this series of thirty-two black-and-white photographs The Flower Vase Cut, referring to the name of one of the mutilations practiced in the Colombian violencia of the 1940s and 1950s in which the amputated limbs were stuffed, so it is said, into the thorax via the neck of the decapitated corpse. In cartoons we laugh at distortions of the body, suggesting just how close violence is to humor. Indeed the human face when crying can seem very close if not identical to that same face laughing. It is, moreover, almost trite to observe that great comedians and clowns bear the burden of great tragedy as well. As for the cartoon quality in violence, hearken to Michael Herr’s reference to his experience in the Vietnam War; he goes to considerable effort to deny these two elements have anything in common: “No jive cartoon,” he says, “where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed back and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game.” No jive cartoon—indeed! So why bother to raise that specter, only to deny it? Why bother to come so close, only to draw back? Is it because the resemblance is too, too troubling, true but troubling, and by this maneuver we do precisely what is necessary, which is to catch a glimpse of the impossible unthinkable and then close it over again? Well, then, what is this impossible unthinkable that in equating war with a cartoon simultaneously heightens their stupendous difference? Did I say heighten, as does Herr when he refers us to the cartoonish move of being dropped from heights, flattened out, “then up again and whole and back in the game”?What emotional register, what law of aesthetics and logic is being transgressed by this heightened drop and even steeper fall into . . . well, into what? Not redemption. That’s for sure. Back into war, that’s what—“up again and whole and back in the game.” Is this not also what occurs when Echavarria humanizes not animals but flowers, meticulously duplicating the exactness and whimsy of botanical drawings with his bleached-out photographs of human bones? At one point in an interview, Echavarria says, “My purpose was to create something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it. The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones— something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.” I myself do not see it that way. The flowers are so obviously not flowers. Instead it is the very clumsiness, the deliberateness of the artifice of posing bones as flowers, that perturbs one—and this is of the same order of artifice that makes the mutilation of the Corte del Florero so powerful, too. The flowers in Echavarria’s photographs have stems made of curving ribs or of the decayed long bones of arms. The petals are formed from what appear to be the human pelvis or spinal vertebrae. In some photographs, small bones like teeth or chips of bones lie to one side, thereby disturbing pretensions to symmetry or completeness. A vertebra hangs delicately off a rib, five of which are bunched together like plant stems emerging from a column of three vertebrae glued together, not as in the human spine, but separated from that, like a child’s building blocks, then stuck front to back, Lying on their bleached-out background, the flowers appear fragile, suspended in midair and ungrounded. They could be flying. The law of gravity no longer holds. There is a sense of a world on hold, a painful absence of sound. What we see is silence, the silence of something gone awfully wrong with the human world such that we are all, God included, holding our breath, which is probably what happens when you fall a long, long way. To add to their strangeness, each photograph bears a title like the Latin names used in the plant illustrations of the famous botanical expedition to Colombia organized by the Spanish crown and led by Jose´ Celestino Mutis at the end of the eighteenth century. Echavarrı´a is very conscious of this genealogy. In fact he sees his flowers as its latest expression. The difference is that Echavarria’s latinate names are hybrids suggesting the grotesque, one pelvic bone flower being named Dracula Nosferatu, while another flower made of a curved rib with a bunch of metacarpals at one end, suggestive of petals, is called Dionaea Misera. Although these names are in small, discreet letters, names are of consuming importance to this work, beginning with the name of the mutilation—The Flower Vase Cut. The name is crucial because on viewing the mutilated body without the name, I doubt whether an observer would get the point—as we say of a joke—without the name. All the observer would see would be a bloody morass of hacked-off limbs and a limbless trunk. The mutilation would be incomplete, by which I mean it would lack the meaning that destroys meaning. I do not understand this. Perhaps I am not meant to. But what I do know is that what mutilation registers, what all mutilation registers, is this wave, this continuous wave-like motion of autosacrifice of meaning heightened then dissipated by the name in conjunction with the corpse as a work of art. I think it goes like this: that in attaching