My Own Private Euphoria: an incomplete post
Inam, with whom I jammed once here, wrote this commenting on my rather ‘weird’ last post:
I like it that your love, your lust and your dreams are overpoweringly solid and real. Actually i am getting quite angry (sigh) with all these middle-aged women who have taken to writing poetry to complain against their husbands and middle-aged men who continue to write about daffodils in order to appear intellectual to women! You might think I have lost my head to rant like this, but trust me, this is what I have found out after all my forays into the city’s art circuit (esp. in English, since you did raise the question of language). Your blog, in my opinion, is a pleasant change and a firm rebellion in the face of such puerile hypocrisies, though you may beg to differ… I think, in the end no art is really real. All artists are pretenders, which is very good for art; however some choose to wear the mask of realism, which remains a mask after all. It’s no use unnecessarily connecting the art with the artist; the “Perfect” artist should be able to create the biggest comedies in time of infinite personal sorrow and vice-versa.
I.
So let me ponder on those things again: am I ‘doing’ literature when I am writing poems in a blog? Is someone, who is not a poet occupationally (let me not use the term profession again), able to write out of his experiential context? Can a amateur poet’s writings be considered as part and parcel of the history of poetry in the language in which he writes? What about a situation like myself: of a man who has only only read few canonised poems in English, much more in Bengali and heard a lot of lyrics of rock songs? Where will I be situated? And finally: how real are artworks? Is a poet a conman, relishing the shape of his creation which started from utter despondency with utter glee? How about the way I write English: the way I have placed “utter despondency” beside “utter glee” in the last sentence?
I was more interested in the adorning of the surface of a loss…
Let me place few things straight. Even if I am not a novice or a stranger in the realm of art I try to remain an outsider. I have few friends who are poets in occupation (in Bengal there are too many) because I have a feeling that poetry is gobbled up by ‘culture’ these days. I personally believe in a kind of oppositional relationship between ‘art’ and ‘culture’. I dabble more in cinema, something much more plebian and infamous for producing costly garbage annually. I have high regards for poetry but I don’t keep myself updated. As Inam hinted in his mentioned comment, culture is overproduced these days and in the process is turning fake! But Bengal being an incorrigibly arty place, we people go on articulating languages which stretches words beyond the literal…
But at least in Bengal, as far the young men and women in this metropolis are concerned, blogging has released a fresh new lease. You don’t need to tread those hackneyed places any more to make your poetic utterances heard. Women are writing more, writing in pseudonymns, writing incognito, writing about things which they wouldn’t possibly articulate either in print or in longhand ten years ago. As I have repeatedly said, I learn a lot from their writings each day, about things which five years of studying English Literature didn’t illuminate much. I knew how the voice of an age is evident in artistic expressions, I knew how an artistic movement informed a work of art or vice versa, but I hardly knew how writing can shape your person into a new subjectivity (I never saw it happening in present continuous tense!) or unravel a fragment of the self which culture doesn’t help much to bloom. I am waiting for the day when expressing oneself in the local language in Internet will be as easy as in English.
In the process, we have wrenched ourselves free from the history of the language. While readers elsewhere might not get the point, we know how our notion of English (and here the language is inexorably literary) is conditioned by more than 300 years of history. It remains the language of a class, a language to be flaunted and exhibited more than to be used in a functional sense. The Web has freed us from the awareness of a crippling history. One should say that the history of the rock music had been very instrumental in our case. The register of the poetic is more readily available from music these days than from sanitised canons. The awareness of the ‘vulgar’ has freed us. In the absence of an editorial mediation – an agency which is nothing but extensions of the universities – people are expressing themselves exactly the way they like it to be. Unaware of the history of the literature, or the trends of last two decades or so, it is only Calibans calling, and it is just the beginning.
I need to qualify my euphoria. I wrote in Bengali for years, but believe me, writing in Bengali is difficult because its so easy to construe few lines of standard poetry in this language these days. Bengal’s poetry is immensely rich and the place is notorious for producing one poet in every three young men (use of gender consciously) in the street. The production had been huge in the last few decades as the history had been faceless (no one knows of distinct historical trajectories followed by the vernacular poetry in the last few decades); it is almost a cottage industry now and overproduction has rendered high-level of skills but low-chances of expressibility. A bloodless craftmanship is something which one encounters in Bengali poetry, everywhere.
My choice of expressing myself in what is our father-tongue rather was a conscious one. Because I never intend to publish these in hard-copies, never intend to be known as a poet in the public, I wanted a space where even Indian-English novels have failed to reach…at ground-zero, a place where local Bangla rock-bands have reached (and failed to reap results), a level where pure expression is possible because culture has still not reached there with its codifications and history of the normative. The magic of words have never failed, but culture has failed miserably. I needed a space, during a moment of crisis in my life, to start from a scratch, to pour myself into words and imminently forgetting it, to give birth to a self and see it flicker and die within moments, to gather all achievements and feel it all as ‘virtual’ the next morning. Blogging, thankfully, has no history or canons; no tradition as yardsticks, no landmarks to imitate or fight with. At least sitting by my keyboard I can start with my emotions and arrive elsewhere…
Phew! I have still not said anything about the adorning of the surface of a loss…
II.
I need to end today’s post mentioning a rich discovery of mine in the blogosphere. I just stumbled across someone’s blog few days – no, nights – ago. She calls herself ‘Average Jane’, she is a mother of a little girl and in her late 30s. As someone commented that the edge of her words grow ever-sharper, she said that she continues writing till she bleeds (probably you can hear her “ouch!” and see her licking her thumb and a crimson patch in the keyboard). Reading, rather viewing her short posts I became embarrassed that I am such a loquacious one. She writes short and sharp prose-pieces. Visit her blog.
She has the voice of a story-teller. Someone told that her daughter is surely having a gala time. But she tells stories with a sudden end rather than a satisfying closure. She would whisper like an woman untimely retired to a land without happenings but infused with memories. One wonders: one has listened to grandmas telling stories, and one thought that younger women have lost their abilities to store memories which can surface – decades latter – like lullabies without tunes. And suddenly I hear someone, just a few years older than me, digging up watery memories and pouring it down my throat. She would talk about objects of memories: about a grandfather clock and its strange hands, about a “cupboard full of pretty knickknacks” and “dainty Japanese dolls”, pink umbrellas and red balloons and sketchbooks. She would talk about a boy who is running forever, a girl named Jasmine and her half-hidden friend Gopu and a mild-looking friend who beheaded a soldier in her dreams or a man in the train reading financial news within whom a question is born. When she writes subtly about eros one shivers back to the memory of how women remembers those zones of your body you never knew existed, when she writes about fears you feel that the nightly corridor down there is not exactly breath-less, when she talks about relationships she might say: “I am who I am because of what my mother made me and my daughter now every single day”.
She is from my city. She exactly is an instance of how blogging has liberated the voice of many women of this age. Reading her posts – I have all pages saved in my computer, the way I do it – I recalled Charulata writing in Satyajit Ray’s film. She says my writings make her nostalgic of her college days and I feel – like many of you my wonderful friends have made me feel – that even if I don’t matter in this world, I might have some value. A day is made. Rather a night, which the next day will undo.
