Rajendra Kishore Panda |
| If the poet had his
way, he would like to break open all doors, cages, prisons, zoos and skies.
He would open up the sea-shells, the seeds, the labia, the crevices in
the rock. He would command the crimson rivers to rush back to the primordial
aorta. He would have razed Indraprastha to shards this morning to build
it up, brick by brick, in the evening. He would have lured Mohini to feed
amrit to all gods, demons and humans, each according to his hunger. Instead,
must he speak about poetry, about creativity ?
I tend to miss the threads of arguments. Cold logic is anathema to me, moulds I hate. I drop the reins, dismount; My horse gallops away: virile and wild, riderless, directionless, to its Ashwamedhas. I discard theories, sermons and commandments. What can I say about poetry ? Everything has its elements. Earth, water, air and fire must be blended with vyoma.Void is an essential ingredient of art, silence has symbiosis with music and poetry. Maybe, poetry's voyage is towards a state where even silence is silent; but a poet may never reach that stage. And there, in that failure, lies the sweet ache of the creative attempt. The unsaid outweighs the said. Like a rishi falling for the temptress near the peak of penance, the poet goes on splashing words and sounds with silences. His Innisfree remains faraway. To arrive is to die, attainment is finis. The formation of man out of the pre-sapiens got under way nearly four million years ago with the apearance of proto-humans, the so-called ape men, and culminated with the emergence of homo sapiens. Since rudimentary cultural activities like tool-making were known to the proto-humans, there was an overlap of well over a million years between the inception of culture and the appearance of man (homo-sapiens). Thus culture was not added on a finished animal, it was rather a central component in the production of that animal itself. Endowed with a richer central nervous system, the homo sapiens interacted with culture more and more, manifest in its significant symbols like rituals, myths, art and language. Man needed these to orient, to communicate and to transcend. Viewed against this glacial progression in the past and the unimaginable possibilities in the future, what we call creative literature today seems to be in a fledgeling infancy. Man is thus an unfinished animal and he tries to both complete and surpass himself through creativity. A Narcissus at the water's edge, he wishes to blow life into his image by the sheer force of gaze and then to pervade the universe with the cosmic ego. Creativity is latent in every man. It is a matter of degree why some men emerge as poets or artists. And yet, apoet cannot sit down and say : today I shall write my saddest lines, tomorrow my sweetest, and the day after my best. The best lines remain unwritten. In the poetic craft, the evocation and the advent may not meet for months.Despite continual ablutions and penance, many of us do not cross even the stage of initiation-rites during a life-time. Poetry comes in various ways. It may have a long incubation. It may also come in glimpses: maybe in a visual haze, a truant fragrance, a whiff of whisper, a fleeting memory re-lived in a moment. It keeps on haunting, makes the poet restless.And the seed-lines sprout. Sprigs, foliage, flowers and thorns grow thereafter. Mercifully, the spell is brief. None can endure an endless euphoria : The 'aha' experience, as Arthur Koestler calls it, comes with the moment of truth, the flash of illumination, when the myriad bits of the puzzle click into an unprogrammed pattern, acquire a new meaning. Of course, I would not say that a work of art is all revelation; craft has its role in shaping its nooks and niches. Man is condemned to meaning. Meaning leads to a maze of interpretations and counter-interpretations. Science does not provide any answer to countless questions. Scientism leads to blind alleys. Between the without and the within, this and not-this, either and or, poetry provides a link language. To discover himself, man has to take birth from moment to moment. Creativity adopts its own obsterics. It keeps alive the sense of wonder of the child playful within the poet.To realise himself, man has to discard all "alibis of unfreedom" including the tyranny of knowledge and reason. The creative man is concerned with transcendence. Transcendence need not always have a 'before' and an 'after'. It may be relational. Transcendence may also be immanent. The 'I' in poetry need not necessarily be personal and singular. Even solitude may be a "form of relatedness", the "soul may be a society". The poet in action is born and unborn continually. The 'now' and 'here' of poetry includes the 'before' and 'after', 'there' and 'somewhere', the linear and lateral, the vertical and horizontal, the circular and the irregular. True poetry cannot be dated and dead, cannot be classified into old and modern. It rubs off the artifice of history and geography. Such poetry is always contemporary. Immortality is here and now. Vyasa, Homer, Kalidasa, Sarala Das, Bharati,Kumaran, Lorca, Rabindranath, Neruda and Nirala exist here and now. They are all our contemporaries. Perhaps a single poem is being written, continually in instalments, by all the poets in their variegated splendour.
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