Love it was that made
us!
Music and love are in the air with the Sufi Festival at Kala Academy and
Valentine’s Day just round the corner. Arundhati Subramaniam, hailed as the
love poet of India, won the Khushwant Singh poetry prize at JLF just a few days
ago. Poets of the Bhakti movement and Sufi saints in medieval times invoked God
and glorified him. Contemporary poetry is in search of love in all its
dimensions from bestial to celestial realms of escatsy. Each one of us craves for the right love to
enter our lives. The power of LOVE elevates us and fills us with an ultimate
feeling of well-being and happiness. From reading and seeing love around us, it
is only when we embark on our personal journey of love that we realize that it
is not about receiving but giving love, which ultimately fulfils and enriches
us. Let’s talk about the different colours of love in books that I have
dwelt-on in the past one month. Utterly
disparate and alienated they may be.
The books we read are not just love stories, but
life stories. Some of them stay with me for the larger-than-life portrayal of a
character or an interlude which leaves an indelible mark on my mindscape. ‘Theory
About Everything’, a recent film at INOX, inspired by the memoir Travelling
to Infinity:My Life with Stephen by
Jane Hawking. The writer comes across as an utterly committed, passionate and
determined homemaker, a rock behind the life and success of Hawking, the great
physicist.
A Ph.D. in Spanish
Poetry, she writes candidly and sensitively about her 25 years of married-life
with Stephen Hawking. She evocatively paints the paradoxical picture of her ex-
husband’s scientific breakthroughs, his rise to stardom and deterioration of
his motor-muscular activity affecting his physical abilities. The camera is the
storyteller as it stays and strays from Jane’s facial expressions and lived
experience.
The interwoven threads
of a warm family life of fun and activity with three children, against the
great odds of a chronically disabled father, add poignancy to the dramatic
detailing. The fact that she, as a young girl, inspired great faith and love in
an otherwise despairing Hawking in the intial stage, when the wasting disease
becomes a reality for him, and then for 25 years held on staunchly, loving
caring is a remarkable feat in itself. Love visited and sustained!
The dichotomy of fame and disease pervades each frame, a
great lesson in the power of life force which has superseded and defied all
logic and science. It makes one believe in a divine presence, a
love beyond compare, though Hawking never puts it into so many clear words of
faith or GOD.
A revisited a great love story that I have never forgotten -
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Catherine’s wildness in ‘Wuthering
Heights’ is the rejection of her gender identity as defined by a bourgeois
society. The heliographic on the walls of her room at Wuthering Heights is the
symbolic remnant of her struggle – Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and
then again Catherine Linton. Her practicality makes her choose to be a lady
over her wild passion for Heathcliff,
which is her real self. Catherine is
women’s anguished voice which revolts; a haunting presence, always to
remind of that which is denied to her – of what she actually wanted to be. A love which let her be the way she was –
wild and passionate and another which gave her everything but denied her
herself.
The book reading session this month was based on the
play, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Williams’s representation
of the eroticized male body on stage for the pleasure of others (whether other
characters or the audience or both) was revolutionary in its day. For example,
according to Dean Shackelford, Blanche DuBois “projects the gaze of the gay
playwright” when she ogles her working-class brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski’s
naked, well-built torso. It is he rather than she who is made by Williams to be
“the principal object of the gaze” in the play. Williams eroticizes and
displays Stanley’s masculinity, betraying his own attraction for the male body
and therefore, opening up the possibility for others to do so as well.
We cannot talk of Streetcar Named Desire and not talk
about the protagonist Blanche
DuBois. She who substitutes her love for her husband with
flagrant sexual misconduct which derails her into delusion and madness. According to one study, Blanche’s rape can be
understood as a sexual means to a spiritual end. When Mitch fails her, Blanche turns to the one element in her world that
will not—Stanley. His potent
sexuality will destroy a desire for the flesh that has completely consumed her
life (and those of her ancestors) and placed her on a one-way, nonstop
streetcar towards death. Blanche rides both the streetcar “Desire” and
“Dies Irae” (latin phrase which means Day of Wrath) toward her own day
of spiritual reckoning, and those streetcars cross tracks in the play’s rape.
Arundhati
Subramaniam’s bardic renditions of love poetry from her latest book of poems
God is a Traveller, musically emphasizes
“the unique, eternal and yet
contemporary, timeless and topical quality of love.” A simmer
of hormone and a carnal need, a shudder in the loins is levitated to a
metaphysical attainment of vacancy and nothingness. Frissons get elevated to
fusions and surrender to the oblivion and vastness beyond comprehension.
Demand, Black Oestrus, Lover’s Tongue, and Rutting are poems that choreograph
the sheer sensuousness of words and rhyme into a verbal rhythm of erotic
poetry: ravish you/with the rip, snarl/and grind of canine/and molar, taste the
ancestral grape/ that mothered you, your purpleness/swirling down my gullet/but
it still won’t be me enough/there was nothing simple about it even then/an
eleven-year-old’s hunger for the wet perfection/an undoing/an
unmaking/raw/raw-/a monsoonal ferocity/of need/reminding you/ that this
uncensored wilderness of greed/is simply/or not so simply/body.
The piece
de resistance of the series would be the Eight Poems for Shakuntala. So here
you are/just another mixed–up kid/daughter of a sage/and celestial sex
worker/clueless/like the rest of us/about your address/the clue Shakuntala is
not to see it / as betrayal/ when the ceiling crumbles/ and you walk/into a
night of stars. An age-old love myth punctuated, twisted into a parody by the
lyricism of modernism.’ A woman lustrous eyed/a deer,two friends/ the lotus,
the bee/ the inevitable man/the heart’s sudden anapest/ a kiss/ jasmine lapis moonshock/ besides who
hasn’t known Dushyanta’s charms? A man with winedark eyes who knows/of the
velvet liquors and hushed laughter/in curtained recesses/ who hasn’t known/ a
man cinnamon-tongued/ stubbled/with desire//
And to wind up the love story, I pay recourse
to the Sufi Mystique at the festival hosted by Kala Academy. Sufi practice helps attain spiritual
love through song, music and dance.
Sufism itself is often seen as an exotic sect comprising of whirling
dervishes and rhythmic divine chants.
Lovers don't finally
meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.
They're in each other all along.
When I
am with you, we stay up all night.
When
you're not here, I can't go to sleep.
Praise
God for those two insomnias!
And the difference
between them.
Love transforms, heals, and
renews. Let’s go find the magic in our lives!
