After "Eliot"

After “Eliot”

It happened simultaneously. A new track ‘After Eliot’  from Johnny Flynn’s album ‘Country Mile’ to be released 30^th Sep, surfaced online premiering on Spin and the book reading held at ICG last week  ‘Clear light of Day’ written by Anita Desai, foregrounded the main theme of time as destroyer and preserver from Eliots’ poems. T.S Eliot continues to drive authors,  pop stars , playwrights alike.  What is it about him that fires minds and creatives can’t seem to leave his work alone?  Recreating, adapting and reconstructing it over and over. 

Bob Dylan, the greatest legend in pop and rock, set a precedent for literate songwriters,  when in 1965, he wrote and sang his song ‘Desolation Row’ inspired by T. S Eliot.  Heavy with allusions and classical references, the song formed the last track of his sixth studio album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’.  Rock and pop age could also be a meaningful montage of competing voices endeavoring to seize on the raw material of life:  its uselessness and meaninglessness.  Eliot shunned the modern world yearning for old patterns but his writing was modernist when he wrote The Wasteland, The Hollow Men , The Four Quartets and The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.  The poems are full of shadows- whispering voices, a heap of broken images, pealing bells-thrumming engines, shattering noise-deafening silences – the imagery appeals to the blood pounding minds of youth. When students read Eliot in their course in English literature, the doom and desolation fires the minds with pleasurable dread.  The heavy pungent phrases like "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" or "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper" tells them that the chaos and decadence they see around themselves is true and that Eliot is directing them to the core where all is not right but the light is also out of the same darkness and chaos. They eye the storm and test its strength through their verses of allusion, pastiche and impersonation sourcing life from dance bars, streets, drug dens, political rallies, war ravaged lands of antiquity to the last carnage.

Anita’s book Clear Light of Day reads like a well-orchestrated musical composition. She quotes poets sixteen times through her narrative, which is divided into four untitled parts paralleling Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poems Burnt Norton and The Wasteland are intricately woven into the narrative to foreground the themes of continuity and change and that time past and time future, dwells in time present. That deliverance from agony and pain is in intuitive meditative symbols of unity through music where all is one. Other books that I can think of now are Catch 22, Lolita and Stephen King’s books.

PJ Harvey’s latest album ‘Let England Shake’ with videos by Seamus Murphy is an experiment in poetry about the timeless cycle of conflict in England and the world. The tensions, rivalry, power structures and grotesque imagery of war ravaged England  It took her two years to get the words right, based on her research of works of TS Eliot, Harold Pinter....To offset the weight of the gruesome words, the music is hauntingly beautiful,  imbuing the  poetry with great energy. Gone is her gutted moan, she strums and sings on her autoharp finding the right chord to carry weighted lyrics of her Eliot-driven laborious honest research.

  

How is our glorious country ploughed?
Not by iron ploughs
Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet,
Feet Marching.I've seen and done things I want to forget;
I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat.

Strains of guitar interrupted by war trumpet charge….. Tracks in ‘Let England Shake’ are :  Let England Shake, The Last Living Rose, The Glorious Land, The Words That Maketh Murder, All And Everyone, On Battleship Hill, England, In The Dark Places, Bitter Branches, Hanging In The Wire, Written On The Forehead, The Colour Of The Earth – it is like reading a book.

Johnny Flynn does not so much as pick lines from Eliot’s poetry but surely the uneasy, discomforting atmosphere. If we were to do a workshop on modern poetry in the lyrics of literate pop songwriters like we did do one on Bob Dylan and Bob Marley an year back at Gitanjali Gallery, we shall find echoes, continuations, parody, mimetic  of  Eliot’s without doubt.
“Long live TS Eliot – The Pop Star’s Poet!”

The Color War

Unfair and Lovely

Be Unfair Be Beautiful, is the latest campaign championed by Nandita Das on the internet and visual media. The inherent color prejudice in Indians is the driving force behind the thriving fairness products industry in the country and psychological fallouts of low self esteem, repression, self-hatred and meager opportunities in life. The tyranny of the past is a formidable force, but it is indeed surprising to know that the narrow domestic wall of color discrimination is a very modern phenomenon. In his book, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, Frank M Snowden, best known for his study of blacks in classical antiquity, portrays the complete absence of virulent color prejudice in ancient societies of the Romans, Egyptians and the Greek. Science, religion and philosophy never differentiated people and picked on inferiors based on color. He insinuates that the trans-Atlantic slave trade needed a theory for its acceptance and perpetuation with the expanding imperialistic forays in different parts of the world. And, therefore, the belief translated into theory that human groups are born unequal with different colored skins. The colors black and white are not just skin pigmentations but have moral, ethnic and social connotations. The white is endowed with goodness, beauty and virtue and the black is evil, impure and ugly. According to Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate, the equation of white with virtue is the most pernicious, destructive ideas in the world….
Growing up, we read Roots by Alex Hailey, Don’t Walk in the Sun by Marita Golden, Color Purple by Alice Walker, To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison – literature which delineates the arduous journey of generations affected by the practices of colorism, shadism and racism. We are beautiful, but in comparison with someone else. The pre-requisite of being good and better requires another whom we can label as not so good. Discrimination is then a powerful tool of our ego and vanity, the service of which results in divisiveness, segregation, hatred and cruelty. The Blacker the Berry, Kiswana Brown and Reena are stories about women who come to accept their dark color and thereby swear to do good by their children by giving them a sense of self, their worth and importance as blacks: ‘the children must have their identities right from the beginning, no white dolls for them.’ The documentary Shadeism, portrays four women and their experiences in varied communities who have internalized their blackness and a four-year-old Tamilian girl perceives herself as ugly and a lesser mortal in comparison to a brown-skinned aunt. ‘Bleaching and fairness creams for the vagina carry the story to bizarre ends,’ says Nandita Das, culminating in an obsessive goal for an altogether whiteness of skin.
I have undertaken a project for English literature college students by doing book readings on novels in their syllabus. My last reading in August was based on Toni Morrison’s maiden work The Bluest Eye, a quest for blue eyes by a black female poor child named Pecola. She is born sweet with sparkling soft eyes and glowing black skin but her mother who has internalized the notion of black as ugly looks at her baby girl with self-hatred and disapproval. The Dick and Jane primer at her school exposes her to an ideal white American blue-eyed family, wherein love and laughter abounds between the family members and their pets. In contrast, her family lives their ugliness by fighting, abusing and maligning each other. Every billboard and movie that she watches plays images of blue-eyed fair-child stars and celebrities who, with their blonde hair, shining white skin and light eyes, are successful, happy and joyous people. Pecola tries to make herself disappear limb by limb, retracts her stomach and her entire persona. But however tightly she shuts her eyes, the images of distaste, alienation, misery and hatred in her life from her abusing, emotionally-impoverished parents, insensitive neighborhood, white adults and other bullish black children do not vanish. They are etched in her mind’s eye starkly and explicitly. Her desperate bid for blue eyes begins as a panacea for all evils in her world, and becomes an obsession. She devours the images of Shirley Temple dancing with Bill Robinson, Jane Marlow becomes her idol and she eats candies wrapped in caricatures of Mary Jane. She eats the candy to swallow Mary Jane, to become Mary Jane. Toni Morrison started writing at the peak of Black movement in America  in the late sixties, when blacks, after centuries of being told that they were enslaved because of their ugliness, woke up to the consciousness of Black is Beautiful. We are happy, beautiful, black and good, they said. Amidst the environment of a surging black individuality, Morrison wanted to chronicle the plight of a dark, female, poor Pecola, lest we forget the pain. The writing challenges the readers to ask themselves of the part played by them in society in making Pecola a pariah, a grounded bird who flaps her wings in a grotesque, futile effort to fly. She wrote a blues narrative for a regional black audience, but the truth in it rendered it universal. The book became a cult ‘cause it absolves all the characters in Pecola’s life of their roles in her lunacy and candidly brought out the question of complicity of the blacks themselves in their own subjugation. Morrison examines with an unblinking stare the perception of blacks who view themselves with a double consciousness, through the eyes of the white population, and internalize the amused contempt, pity the condemning gaze. In the process, they come to hate themselves and others like them and begin the quest for blue eyes.
 Prejudices are deeply entrenched in our psyche and however much we may think we are evolved and have overcome the discriminations, it requires an alert consciousness to reason out and fight the die cast by them. Mississippi Masala, a production by Mira Nair, is a tale of how prejudice makes victims and instigators (Roshan Seth perpetuates what he has been through himself) of us all. Regional literature does not sell, unless it is cast in the mould of a cosmopolitan avatar. Movies make it to the box office if they have an all white cast. Black characters can mingle with a white cast, but count how many of them survived to the end?  ‘Pointing out that black characters die in movies isn't even clever anymore -- it's the kind of obvious, trite joke that bad movies make about other bad movies. But, inexplicably, it keeps happening. Black characters end up in supporting roles, instead of being well-developed characters. They're just there, so we can judge the other (white) characters by how they treat them. But our open-mindedness usually stops at the point of actually paying to see a black leading man or woman. What's weirder is when the movie pretends to be about the triumph of a minority character, but instead spends all its time talking about the white people who save him. The black character is just a thing that needs to be taken care of, not an actual character – like maybe To Kill A Mocking Bird. So what’s the deal? Money. Once again, it's money. To get people in the theater seats, the story has to revolve around white people.
Again, we can blame the studios all we want. But they've learnt from hard experience that for the most part, if they don't play to our prejudices, we simply won't go see their movie!’
 Caste discrimination, religious bigotry and color prejudice is as immutable in India as in the rest of the world. Nandita Das, we have a long way to go!

Dialogue at the Goa University

The 3 Litterateurs

The arts, literature and music are food for the soul. These encourage us to be grander human beings in this world. The ongoing visiting research professorship at the Goa University is an opportunity for students and the public to meet and interact with world-renowned, erudite cultural ambassadors of the humanities programme.  Western music in dialogue with the arts, history and philosophy by Professor Santiago Lusard Girelli, University of Seville was a course in the history of western music, beginning with the Gregorian chant in the 5^th century to the post modern, contemporary music of the times. Study of Liberal Arts towards Goodness- Truth-Beauty set the tone for the series of presentations to follow. The evolution of music through the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern periods of history etched a mind- map in tandem with the profound changes in the philosophy of thought and art prevalent during those times. Live performances by the team of musicians from Seville served as aperitif to the musical entrée of recorded compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Eric Whitacre and many more.

And then, we met the performance poet, novelist, librettist and musician- Jeet Thayil, whose lyrical lucidity and biographical asides through sessions of reading-aloud-a-poem made us co-creators in the creative process of reading and writing poetry. He led a medley of thirty through the literary analyses of lyrical poetry; those beautiful songs of triumph and loss, mingling in clear tonality and ringing with joy of beautiful human speech. 

What good is poetry that cannot be indulged in, celebrated, danced and sung to?  The engaging experience had us revisit poets like Elizabeth Bishop and her dear friend Robert Lowell who, in his poem Skunk Hour, has laid his affection bare for all to see.  The comical yet woebegone interlude with John Berryman and his famous work The Dream Songs, offering depressing vignettes of Berryman alias Henry, led us intrigued for further explorations. A grim, unrelenting portrait of sing-song rhymed quatrains by Theodore Roethke My Papa’s Waltz left us at once contemplative and awed. Robert Creeley’s I Know a Man introduced us to the Black Mountain coterie of poets who excelled in narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an utterance. Our encounter with Allen Ginsberg, the poet of the beat generation and his poem The Howl, a template used by many to write their own poems, was inspiring. James Wright and his innovative style of using titles and first and last line to great dramatic effect, was a lesson in writing our own poems. Joan Larkin’s poem Origin gave us a feel of ‘unblinking gaze’ and ruthless clarity on heart-wrenching subjects like child abuse.
The class, which started with American poetry and a reserved audience demeanor confronted with a consummate poet, opened out to a warm interactive interlude with an avalanche of cascading verse from Indian poets. Jeet Thayil, a repertoire of Indian poetry, an outcome of his ambitious endeavor to anthologize Indian poetry from Fulcrum magazine in Boston to Bloodaxe and Penguin editions, brought our way an in-depth resource of a canon.  The forays into the voices of Indian English poets threw in a spate of debates on choice of language, context of reading poems …but Jeet Thayil dissuaded arguments in favour of his mission of eulogizing the feel and form of lyrics in poems. The juxtaposition of  very British stylistic technique of Nissim Ezekiel with his prowess at churning out a poem of limited grammar and the spoken everyday English of the people in the streets, made interesting study.   One great benefit I derived was being introduced to many poets I had never previously read, the lost and obscured poets as Jeet called them, whose beautiful verse is not only relegated to back of beyond but is marked by a complete absence, not a print available anywhere. Jeet Thayil came upon Gopal Honnalgere, Srinivas Rayaprol, Lawrence Bantleman,  G.S. Sharat Chandra in old manuscript copies, a treasure trove of lyrical poetry, which was worth an inclusion in the contemporary anthology of Indian poets. Dom Moraes, Eunice de Souza and Manohar Shetty, poets with a Goan connection, were read enthusiastically.
The experience was akin to turning interminable corners in a maze and coming across yet another poet with a unique charm. The poetry reading parleyed into a poetry workshop for those who write their own poems. Sitting through the sessions, it was indeed remarkable to see the ruthless, but constructive appraisal by Jeet of the amateur attempts by the students ( I was really embarrassed by mine).  His definitive encouraging, truthful and restful approach evoked even the reticent voices to speak and add to the ongoing exchange.

The songs of delight reached a crescendo on the last day, 22^nd August, 2013, when Jeet Thayil performed his poems on stage in a public event. Standing upright nonchalantly, he effortlessly ploughed through his original pieces of work, as if bells resounding and bouncing off the frozen peaks and valleys of a mountainous range.  And, he had the chutzpah to render a Ghazal in English with the refrain ‘In Malayalam’ through it, an intimate, intense and pleasurable experience with a poet.  Jeet Thayil has awakened us to ‘the jolt, the jive, joie de vivre ‘of writing and reading poetry.

 Finally, it was Ashok Vajpeyi’s turn to delight us with his colorful insights in the arts. He is a cultural creative, and has been involved in an endeavor to bring about a cultural revolution through his studies in poetry, music and the arts. The opening lecture of ‘Why Literature’ illuminated the light of literature which drives away the darkness and is appreciated by those who have inculcated patience and are involved in a voyage to their inner cores. Literature is a half-truth, he said, which gets completed with your truth. His work towards Polish poetry and Indian poets of yore like Kabir and Ghalib, was a comparative study in their lives and works. Poetry of resistance, a bid to bring about change in prevailing norms of rule and life, and the art of reading poetry in different languages equally inspired us and led us down lanes and by-lanes of intersecting voices of poets.

Meeting and attending such lectures, intellectual elegance was excited and life has been gradually exalted, conversation purified and enlarged. Thank you, Goa University and all those who conceived, sustained and brought it about.

 I end this note with words from the book ‘An Equal Music’ –Music, such music and poetry, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music – not too much, or the soul could not sustain it- from time to time.

Rendezvous with Jeet Thayil

After a long time, I found myself ensconced in the cool environs of the Goa University with a teacher of poetry par excellence. He led a medley of thirty through the literary analyses of lyrical poetry; those beautiful songs of triumph and loss, mingling in clear tonality and ringing with joy of beautiful human speech.  Meet the performance poet, novelist, librettist and musician- Jeet Thayil, whose lyrical lucidity and biographical asides through sessions of reading-aloud-a-poem made us co-creators in the creative process of reading and writing poetry.

What good is poetry that cannot be indulged in, celebrated, danced and sung to?  The engaging experience had us revisit poets like Elizabeth Bishop and her dear friend Robert Lowell who, in his poem Skunk Hour, has laid his affection bare for all to see.  The comical yet woebegone interlude with John Berryman and his famous work The Dream Songs, offering depressing vignettes of Berryman alias Henry, led us intrigued for further explorations. A grim, unrelenting portrait of sing-song rhymed quatrains by Theodore Roethke My Papa’s Waltz left us at once contemplative and awed. Robert Creeley’s I Know a Man introduced us to the Black Mountain coterie of poets who excelled in narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an utterance. Our encounter with Allen Ginsberg, the poet of the beat generation and his poem The Howl, a template used by many to write their own poems, was inspiring. James Wright and his innovative style of using titles and first and last line to great dramatic effect, was a lesson in writing our own poems. Joan Larkin’s poem Origin gave us a feel of ‘unblinking gaze’ and ruthless clarity on heart-wrenching subjects like child abuse.
The class, which started with American poetry and a reserved audience demeanor confronted with a consummate poet, opened out to a warm interactive interlude with an avalanche of cascading verse from Indian poets. Jeet Thayil, a repertoire of Indian poetry, an outcome of his ambitious endeavor to anthologize Indian poetry from Fulcrum magazine in Boston to Bloodaxe and Penguin editions, brought our way an in-depth resource of a canon.  The forays into the voices of Indian English poets threw in a spate of debates on choice of language, context of reading poems …but Jeet Thayil dissuaded arguments in favour of his mission of eulogizing the feel and form of lyrics in poems. The juxtaposition of  very British stylistic technique of Nissim Ezekiel with his prowess at churning out a poem of limited grammar and the spoken everyday English of the people in the streets, made interesting study.   One great benefit I derived was being introduced to many poets I had never previously read, the lost and obscured poets as Jeet called them, whose beautiful verse is not only relegated to back of beyond but is marked by a complete absence, not a print available anywhere. Jeet Thayil came upon Gopal Honnalgere, Srinivas Rayaprol, Lawrence Bantleman,  G.S. Sharat Chandra in old manuscript copies, a treasure trove of lyrical poetry, which was worth an inclusion in the contemporary anthology of Indian poets. Dom Moraes, Eunice de Souza and Manohar Shetty, poets with a Goan connection, were read enthusiastically.
The experience was akin to turning interminable corners in a maze and coming across yet another poet with a unique charm. The poetry reading parleyed into a poetry workshop for those who write their own poems. Sitting through the sessions, it was indeed remarkable to see the ruthless, but constructive appraisal by Jeet of the amateur attempts by the students ( I was really embarrassed by mine).  His definitive encouraging, truthful and restful approach evoked even the reticent voices to speak and add to the ongoing exchange.

The songs of delight reached a crescendo on the last day, 22^nd August, 2013, when Jeet Thayil performed his poems on stage in a public event. Standing upright nonchalantly, he effortlessly ploughed through his original pieces of work, as if bells resounding and bouncing off the frozen peaks and valleys of a mountainous range.  And, he had the chutzpah to render a Ghazal in English with the refrain ‘In Malayalam’ through it, an intimate, intense and pleasurable experience with a poet.

Jeet Thayil has awakened us to ‘the jolt, the jive, joie de vivre ‘of writing and reading poetry. I end this note with words from the book ‘An Equal Music’ – Poetry, such poetry, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music – not too much, or the soul could not sustain it- from