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This article has been sent to you by Palash Biswas ( bangaindigenous@gmail.com )
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Source: The Hindu (http://www.hinduonnet.com//2001/03/18/stories/1318067e.htm)
Hedging the heart
To what is the poet responsible? Can poetry involve itself with
politics? Or is it an autonomous, aesthetic object? While there
can be no hard-and-fast rules, poetry that ignores the historical
relationship between the self and society becomes lifeless.
So too is a poet who only sees the reality around him, says noted
poet JAYANTA MAHAPATRA.
A QUESTION I should like to ask myself today is: If poetry makes
us more conscious of the essence of our day-to-day existence, of
life's complexities and meaning, does it have an effect upon
action, even political action? One would confirm that this is a
very old idea; and that one cannot deny the truth of the
statement that there is an eventual effect on our actions,
whether social or political. And if poetry may influence
politics, we could say that poetry is politics, and so this
poetry is not poetry at all, it is just not good for anything.
But life is reminiscence, and therefore our poetry too is
reminiscence. This memory, this terrible sepulchre which we have
inherited, and carry inside us, will not leave one alone, ever.
And the poet will ask: Who is that child crying, why, without a
mouth? Along with that eternal equation of rich and poor, the
splintered dilemma of day and night, of peace and war. Can poetry
ever help to solve it? Can poetry ever turn the world and the
workings of the world into song?
Familiar as I am with a little of Indian English poetry and the
poetry written in Oriya, Bengali and Assamese, would I be wrong
to conclude that most of our poets are encased in a private world
of their own invention, where they cultivate certain delusions?
For example, in their superiority to practical life, the belief
in the autonomy of their poetry, and their innermost desire to
resist change formally, intellectually and emotionally. The
dilemma of narcissism, of too much self, I should think, deviates
from the direction of true poetry that should find a sense of
relation between self and other, the inner and outer world, the
personal and social worlds. John Berger, in The Success and
Failure of Pablo Picasso, writes perceptively about this dilemma
of modern artists. I like to quote:
They are far away and unseen - so that at home most people are
protected from the contradictions of their own system: those very
contradictions from which all development must come.
Many of our poets (those who live in a bureaucratic of academic
world) elevate the artist to the ethereal, where we deny the
connections between self and other, separating language from
social relations. We revere this isolated human being (our
artist, our poet) and treat his imagination as something he has
inherited, a gift from God, as though there were no logical
relationship, or historical relationship between the self and the
world. We are then aware that we write without any real sense of
community or audience.
That is probably why the poetry of many Indian English poets
fails, when these poets prefer to live abroad, "exiled" by their
own choosing. Such a poet, humanly, would be very lonely. But
what will this loneliness mean to his art? It will mean he will
begin to write longingly about the country he abandoned; or write
patronisingly on the values he grew up with. Later, he is sure to
run out of subjects or themes. He might not run out of emotion or
feelings but he will, one feels, run out of subjects to hold
them.
Clearly, the great poets of Latin American and Eastern Europe
live inside history, as is the case with our poets writing in
their respective regional languages, and their imaginations are
vitalised by that deeper perspective. In comparison, much of
Indian poetry in English appears lifeless, stuck in the mire of
trifling intimacies, without the arms of history and tradition.
Frankly, I should like to write such a poetry, a poetry which
comes out of the ashes of our own culture. However, to cultivate
this relationship between the social and the personal doesn't
seem easy. One is afraid that such writing could bring in a
measure of self-consciousness to it because of a loss of moral
poise.
A poem which resulted from my periodic visits to the starvation-
fields of Kalahandi, and which perhaps suffers from an impatient
self-consciousness because of this bridge between the social and
personal, is titled "Deaths in Orissa:"
Faces of tree-bark and grief
hang against God's hand in the world
that cannot lift itself up to help.
..
Oh I am a poet who barks like a dog.
Open the window, I say, so I can breathe.
Let not my memory be like a tiger in ambush.
But there is this dangerously alive body.
and only a lathi or knife can tear it apart.
This might not be a good poem. But it came out of my own
experience. And was an honest attempt of mine. But what I'd like
to clarify is that it came from my own justification to think.
Eliot, however, with his stance of resigned defiance, was often
against the idea of the poet as thinker. In his words: "In truth
neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking - that was
not their job." What appears as thought in a poet is no more than
the emotional equivalent of thoughts prevalent in his time. As
far as poetry is concerned, whether these thoughts were part of a
great philosophy or not is indifferent, so long as they express
some permanent human impulse. At the same time, poetry should
have the freedom to express in any way appropriate to it the
diversity of human experience. We may take this further to say
that a poet is responsible to his conscience, to his sense of
what is right and wrong, that comes from both knowledge and
judgment. To locate the relation of poetry to social action is
difficult. Perhaps this has never been done; so it is not
possible to define what that relation is. But this is true: that
poetry has some effect upon conduct, in so far as it affects our
emotions. To what extent then, is the poetry, say of someone like
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, an effect?
Poetry has the right to judge. One feels one has the right to
make such a statement. One can infer that our right to judge is
fed by the obsequious ways of our politicians, who must
ingratiate themselves with a mass electorate. This is evident
because our public men may think and feel like the emperor
Aurangzeb, but there are none who would talk like him in front of
their public audiences.
Poets, probably, watch the game of politics from the sidelines.
We are spectators, when we are poets: not players. Although the
view from the sidelines enables us to see clearly much that is
blurred to the players, it also distorts vision in certain ways.
And our poet, the spectator, easily assumes toward the players an
attitude of condescension, inclining toward disdain.
So, a great danger we encounter, as poets, away from direct
participation in the affairs of the community, is that we take
ourselves easily as the guardians of moral purity. I could say:
Politics is dirty and the government is a fraud; but I, as a
poet, am clean, my aims honourable. I have better things to do
than politics, and no time to waste on plotters and schemers.
Politics can only distract me from those better things, remove me
from the better people who do those better things, and probably
splash me with mud and blood in the end.
So let a poet not be snug in his belief that he is the upholder
of his society's (or of his country's) morals. This is wrong. Let
not this vanity lead to a sort of ranting, a protest that could
ultimately veer him away from the true poetry that is his goal.
In one of my own poems, there are three lines which say:
Any time my Government breaks its promises, a line of this poem
is dragged along the wide, clean streets of New Delhi...
Maybe this is an example of what I referred to, i.e., of my stand
as a guardian of moral behaviour. In stating this I do seem to
suffer from a small sense of guilt - a guilt that our educated
middle-class carry with them when they go on to criticise the
government for whatever ails our people. And yet, no world would
perhaps exist unless poetry (out of all the arts) creates it for
us. And this poetry has its source within every person who lives.
Therefore, I don't think it would be out of place to say that the
poet who doesn't see what is happening around him is dead; and
the poet who only sees reality around him is also dead. The poet
who is only irrational will only be understood by himself and his
closest friend or lover, and this is very sad. The poet who is
all reason will even be understood by fools, and this is also
terribly sad. So poetry will not stand by hard and fast rules, by
good and evil; but it will be there and cannot be defeated.
In the end, two alternatives come to mind when one thinks of the
responsibility of poets. First, is it right to put such a burden
on a man of imagination and dreams, on a poet? Secondly, is there
no other class of individuals (I should say, intellectuals like
scientists, philosophers and statesmen) who might also be held
responsible?
Poetry is a deep, inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the
Vedas and Psalms, and the content of religions. The poet
confronted nature's phenomena and in the early ages called
himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation. In the same way, to
defend his poetry, the poet of the modern age accepts the honour
from the masses. Today's social poet is still a member of the
earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with
darkness, today he must speak and interpret the light.
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