I do not belong to any generation – the modern world and all its generations – actually I am just the collective minute or enormous reflection of the fallen spoilt hapless coward mad voiceless thief blind ascetic comrade traveller rotting bodies soulless afflicted with tuberculosis – just the veins and arteries of the conscious unconscious obsessed atman of the movable immovable corpses of the living world. I am neither mad nor talented, as the meanings of these words are not clear to me, just as the concepts of God Satan poetry sin honesty idealism form variety and man are not clear – or else these have become outdated for me.  Singularly all words are meaningless – non-connotative – because man is the creator of words and man himself cannot know his final ‘self-identity’. 

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Man is born into a soundless and dumb world because he has to and he waits his entire life for another soundless world because he has to. There is nothing else for a modern man to do except wait for death. Tagore’s ‘Tori theke Teerey’ (boat to the shore), or Kierkegaard’s ‘Final Shipwreck’, Jibanananda’s accidental death, Rimbaud’s silence, Manik Bandyopadhyaya’s addiction, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Dupre’s suicide, Jesus’s birth to a shepherd father, Dostoyevsky’s Underground, Celine and Miler’s Dowden’s, Claude Peleau’s, Subhas and Saileshwar’s spitting life on the face of life – the wait – perhaps they can be united on this one point.

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Man hangs his head and waits on for the final call. It is from this endless wait, history and philosophy and history philosophy together ... that poetry rises through an extreme self-explosion – otherwise why do our eyes roll up in anxiety noticing needle-like cracks in the 90 stories high balcony-civilisation? Why do we have to build the resistance of poetry for man to exist? Else, why do we throw ourselves at the feet of poetry alone absconding from ‘Spring Quarter Guard’?

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I think it is this very consuming, all-consuming nature of poetry that has made it, and indirectly the poet, fearsome to the modern man. ‘Fearsome’ to those who have led their everyday lives treating poetry as an opponent, hiding and playing behind huge walls of the occupational world, they heard the city-sea-siren without admitting anything, and it was found that none of them were men – in times of extreme crisis the masks fall open and the real faces peek out, Most men die like animals (Ernest Hemmingway) -   no idealism or God-consciousness other than genial poetry can save man – perhaps even poetry cannot, but at least poetry ‘justifies’ life, directs man to stand face to face with life, makes life wonderful. Opposite ideologies coexist. And therefore Dostoyevsky’s ‘Hippolyte’, who has never smoked in his life, lighted his first cigarette with greater pomp than the sound of gunpowder on hearing of the existence of the atom bomb. How laughable is a cigarette’s ability to damage when compared to that of the atom bomb! 

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This fear of poetry is not without ground – this fear is the coexistence of white blood cells with the red blood cells in our body, fear is the Geraldine of a deathly white night, fear is Baudelaire’s whore, Milton’s woman, Jibananda’s history-consciousness, it is the primary livelihood of the asylum authorities, this fear has a foetal link to the first living cell of the modern civilization. This fear proves for the final time that poetry is more important than the supposed civilization.

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Baudelaire has understood what Wordsworth could not. The ‘Jiban’ (life) component of Jibanananda realized it, and so did Jean-Paul Sartre and the majority of the existentialist philosophers – “The cosmos is clinging to me like paralysis” (My Rapid Activities), they had understood what I have tried to explain, that poetry has a crooked, oblique relationship to nature’s terror. Alas! It is because the civilised are unclear about whether and how acceptable civilization is, how it is to be accepted, how unacceptable it is, how it is to be unaccepted – that today we see a heap of flesh and fat and the two walking the same road with lifelong bone disease.

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Whoever suffers bone pains like me

Has only to think of me

He will not join me in the spirit by the spaceway

For what use to reunite a being in spirit

and not in flesh?

(To Have Done With the Judgement of God – Antonin Artaud)

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Or else bullets fly and strikes are called to protect the interest of the party rather than idealism – the curfew horns of death blow with wedding bells. As far as memory goes – men united against the forest and darkness and began construction on earth in the age when there was no calendar, there was extreme hopelessness, chaos, helplessness and every moment carried a defeat. In fact, when mutual give and take proved that nature’s gods and goddesses had nothing to offer but blind rage and it was inferred that it was fruitious to ignore them and keep faith in our own abilities – it is then that the modern man took birth in us – we ran from the forests as much as one life would allow and began building the civilization – and today, in the year 1969, the civilized world is eager to call itself self-reliant. The professional intellectuals and the bourgeoisie so firmly believe in the immortality of the civilization that they are not ready to admit any other power but this – beyond the walls of laboratory and history books... There is no way to deny that we cannot get a picture of a sovereign village in Ireland or some remote village of Bangladesh – all the innocence and mystery has died – the oppressors’ hand has triggered a rebellion in even the last dregs of human feelings. Gramophone has arrived to rape the heavenly music of life. Post the world war, modern civilization like Mephistopheles has separated us from the foetus.

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But how successful will this revolution, or this ‘Dam’ in Subo Acharya’s words, be against Maya-Prakriti? How much security do the ten-crore constitutions of the world have to offer us? Is the modern man merely modern, or is he primitive and modern at the same time? The modern man can no longer completely accept those (hermits, ascetics?) who have surrendered themselves to the Prakriti and the gods and have forever sounded praises. Their honesty is being put to question – no longer is there an urge to accept their advice and preachings without a second thought. Because, they have ignored man’s psychology altogether. Except for some tribes and primitives cults, they are a forgotten lot.    

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Those who do not admit any mystery beyond the physical sciences, those who have never forgotten the difference between soil and money, those that do not accept man’s independence apart from created laws, created ethics and business deals, these are the ones who are responsible for the significant societal diseases, repression, and obscure obsession.  Social security, political coexistence, food, marriage does not determine man’s ultimate well-being. Those that are fighting for these have our support because these were the main reasons for the building of civilization – these are man’s fundamental birthrights. But no political party and scientist could ensure the second condition for civilization, that is, the guarantee for man’s immortality, the guarantee of living in ignorance of the fact that human lives are so transient in the context of a few lakh years’ old universe. And that is why one day the hands become numb even amid all luxuries – the social-unsocial divide disappears in a moment.  Why does Rabindranath shudder, staring at the bottomless ocean of the sky and pens down a Brahma Sangeet? And why does the woman kick out all the flowerpots from the veranda? Has she gone mad? Keats’ Hyperion had understood that the decline of their generation had begun with the birth of Apollo – perhaps it is not only because of the nameless fear of establishment and shelter, that men are so much in love with their children, this is not a mere illusion. The fear that men have of poetry, despite knowing that it is infallible, is nothing but the fear of leaving the much-abused, majorly-futile life mechanism for another.

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The degree to which a murderer fears life before he is washed off his sins (Rasklenikov, Dimitri Karamazov), is the same that a man consumed by lifelong greed fears for poetry up until his self becomes clear to him. The catharsis of the murderer and the self-realization of man comes about after an elongated period of pain and burning in the white flame of repentance – generally in the modern world, depression, powerlessness, maladjustment, sexual obsession, poverty – appear as luxury and sorrow and cleanses our soul.  

Poetry is the ultimate shelter for the lost ones, who have everything and yet own nothing. Poetry is the only answer for the whole gamut of questions and sabotages, of the ancient and modern man, it is the only means to resolve the conscious and subconscious conflicts of the educated and the ill-educated.  Poetry is the ‘ultimate synthesis’.

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Poetry is man’s liberation and actualization. Poetry is intensely personal because man himself is an author. Poetry is the ultimate dharma for any modern poet. The world – time – poetry – reader and taste are one and indivisible.

 

 

 

(2)

Most of the words in the traditional dictionary are meaningless to real poetry. The university jargon cannot match up to poetry because they carry the odour of tradition, ‘set beliefs’, and a set of idiosyncrasies. And yet we have to continue working with these very words day in and day out. It is difficult to predict whether these words could be done away with if the arts progressed in the right direction. In the meantime, the poet/ creator has to make do with these words after purifying them with his unique attitude.

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All words are created from some special signal, a special motive. ‘The Icelandic Saga’ or ‘modern jazz’ is much more universal and necessary than so-called great, deliberate poetry because words have a lesser role to play in the former.

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Man’s leaning towards artificial civilization and superficial education is ostentatious. Inwardly, however, man is always eager to return to poetry’s liberating spirit by casting away the garb of imposed education. He is restless to get back to his core feelings. And therefore the degrees and theories are relegated as means to earn a living only. These are slightly helpful to maintain a balance between stagnant progress and man’s inner life. The role of informed words is negligible in man’s life.    

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Perhaps the emphasis that James Joyce and modern linguists have placed on words has satiated the purpose of literary history but the fact is that Joyce’s use of words is a major hindrance to the understanding of his works. It is true that Joyce’s sonorous and visionary language has helped him escape the stale standards set by orthodox linguists, it has inspired us to penetrate the impenetrable surface of Ulysses, and has made it an unputdownable work. But it is not Joyce but D. H. Lawrence who is one of us!

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A linguist’s investigative stance has little connection with man’s free language. It is only in poetry that man finds his own words. A baby’s shriek, the delirium of a dying man, and the incoherence of the mentally ill find connections with the complex web of life only through poetry.

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We demand (1) a language that will strike directly at man’s heartland, (2) poetry (or collectively literature) that is free from orthodoxies, (3) a world literature.

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There are no ‘indecipherable’ or ‘obscene' words in poetry. It is only those who isolate the word from the collective impact of poetry – who alienate particular incidents from life as a whole, separate an organ from the body, divide the ‘atman’ from the perishable body – that complain of the impenetrability of poetry.

‘Everybody is not a poet’ and everybody is not a reader. For the some that are readers and the some that are poets the incomprehensibility of poetry is perhaps the most incomprehensible – once the reader enters the maze of poetry, everything for him gains meaning. He can silently kick whatever is not meaningful and hence not poetry without making a ruckus about it.

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Obscenity? As soon as someone calls something obscene the existence of obscenity in his inner world is exposed. “Esse est percipi” – if any iota of this theory by British philosopher Barkley is to be believed, then it is clear that the people who even today get the sniff of obscenity in literature are the very people who need to be condemned for obscenity. As I have said before, there is a kind of intentionality behind placing special importance on particular words or incidents. This intentionality is dangerous for both poetry and life. It is this kind of divided consciousness that gives rise to various institutions, academies and establishments within poetry. This is how life is divided and the class struggle begins within man.     

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Albert Camus, in ‘Reflections on Guillotine’ says -

 

“The lowest of criminals and the most upright of judges meet side by side, equally wretched in their solidarity. Without that right, moral life is utterly impossible. None among us is authorized to despair of a single man, except after his death, which transforms his life into destiny and then permits a definitive judgment. But pronouncing the definitive judgment before his death, decreeing the closing of accounts when the creditor is still alive, is no man's right. On this limit, at least, whoever judges absolutely condemns himself absolutely.”

 

In the words of Saileshwar Ghosh, “A man who is still bothered with obscenity has not grasped hundred percent of life’s obscenities.” Perhaps, Saileshwar was referring to man’s ‘non-actualizations’ and insecure existence on earth as life’s obscenity.

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What a real reader demands of his favourite poet are not solutions to everyday practical problems: they do not want direct answers to ideological or philosophical questions regarding the pleasing-obscene, beautiful-ugly, comprehensible-incomprehensible, they are definitely not looking for flowery words. The reader wants the poet’s unique consciousness of life, he wants to compare his own interpretations of life with that of the poet’s. In sum, life is their shared theme.

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The distance between the reader and the poet at the priceless moment when the reader is reading the poem is not spiritual but completely physical. Even this physical distance becomes intolerable. Alas! Why have we been born in separate wombs? Why are there different fathers and mothers? This primal injustice of God seems infuriating. My dear friend and German writer Karl Weissner put it this way in Manifesto of the Grey Generation’s tape record –

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“In your brain a tongue forms that can taste the sweetness no matter how highly diluted. To this curious tongue, a page obscure becomes a pool of honey from which streams of labour swill. And then you see each phrase of sentence tapping its foot impatiently to give out its meaning. Finally, your insatiable tongue demands he writes in flesh, if he is alive. “Pull down your pants.” The tongue commands. Meanings creep – granted that a writer wants to love up his readers and give something quite close to sperm.”  

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Yes, literature should be societal – language must penetrate – it should reveal itself in its own way – it should be unique – language will create words, language will throw up language – it will inject itself with lifelike hymns, it will reveal the society’s deepest mysteries – Christ Buddha emperor, Cassius, Mohammad Ali, the Indian metaphysical concept, the ones that are sharpening the nails inside the atman, the dog’s terrorizing shrieks, the women who are stabbing people, bottle, trunks, songs, ashtray, bottle openers, the odour of a man’s body on the palm of the hands – in short, all the necessary and unnecessary things of life.

Language is the world’s primal anarchic power, which can trample the decisions of those with vested interests and proclaim the ultimate goal of the earth and life. All problems of the modern world are linguistic because all problems are expressed in language. A motivated man will never regulate language because unruliness is the essence of language. To the general public, language is merely a self-regulated instrument. It is only in the hands of writers and poets that language surrenders itself. Language confesses to the poet, justifies the whole gamut of people’s confessions, and expands man’s insignificant existence to century-long phenomena.

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It is to this effect that Guillaume Apollinaire defined poetry as ‘pure flame’ or the last fire that blazes out from the body in the crematorium – pure flame – because it is here that the darkness of the womb dissolves into the blind passion and black happiness of living –

 

No history philosophy civilization past present future can be singled out in man – everything is immersed in the ‘Eternal Now’ (Alan Davie: Towards a New Definition of Art) – beyond this current of pure poetry everything is artificial and rotten.

 

 

(3)

 

Often in his life, Tagore has felt the need to separate his material success and career from his spiritual life. The vision of our dark life amid prismatic colours destroys our sacrifices and meditations – Rabindranath has appealed to his readers (in Senjuti) to search for true poetry without yielding to the illusory temptations of external events. Even on the day of the ultimate celebration, Tagore asks his readers to judge a poet through his works only.

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Perhaps he realized that one whole Tagore (with the superhuman and immeasurable capabilities that Rabindranath displayed throughout his life is out of bounds for most modern men) was an enemy to Tagore’s poetry. His worldwide fame could consume his own creation. Surprisingly, the tug of war between life and poetry had sometimes terrified even Rabindranath. What the dual-nondualistic Rabindranath feared most as a poet was his Jiban Charit (autobiography).

 

Tagore’s ‘Jiban Charit’ cannot be compared to the autobiographies or diaries of writers in the present time. Most modern writers have overcome what Rabindranath wrote for – the conflict between spiritual and material worlds, personal crises, and his God. Not only Rabindranath but also most litterateurs, social workers, philosophers, and thinkers of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced this conflict – they were not able to touch the dream dimension of life’s ideology as they could not extract themselves from the corruption of the societal personality; had they been successful, the modern Bengali writer could have escaped a lot of suffering. The poisonous and heartless world that Rabindranath feared as a poet – the Jiban Charit – is the one where the modern writer dwells. Their writings are directly entwined with this life. They collect their inspiration and philosophy from this life’s senility and bubble constructions.

Literature in itself can be called Jiban Charit. Those who do not know about the secret life of Basudeb Dasgupta will not understand some portions of Debotader Koek Minute, Ratanpur, Bomon Rohosyo. Will anybody who has not seen the drunk, ticketless Subhas Ghosh on the Baranagar rail platform at one O’clock in the night appreciate his extraordinary language and the incoherence in his writing? If you attempt to understand the poignant and twisted meaning of Subo Acharya’s Kebal Madhabir Jonye, you must remember that magazines like Ultorath and Jalsa are still doing the rounds in the market and may at any time land up on your writing table.

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Above all, how will someone with no knowledge of Jean Genet’s life and pilgrimage justify ‘The Thief’s Journal’?

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What I want to put across is that a true writer is self-sufficient. I do not believe in any piece of ideology or a generation that is beyond the whole of a writer. I do not believe in the Hungry Generation though I am one of its founders. In actuality, whenever any group of subgroups emerges within literature it must be regarded as the readers’ side-effects. I am not a traditional revolutionary. In fact, life’s insults perhaps hurt me more than most people. I am immune to the tension that typical writers belonging to various establishments of Bengali literature are feeling at the moment.    

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Not only the hungry generation but any generation or group such as the Kallol or the Krittibas are but a heap of papers and some writer’s names – it will not be wise to judge the true quality of the writings by grouping them all together, it is necessary to judge each work separately. I don’t believe in any generation, I don’t believe in any generation. Because there is a qualitative distance between the writer and the officials of cooperatives. No Hungry Generation can tread thee, immortal bird! – Keats. It is only in this sense that a writer can be ‘hungry’. This is not the hunger of the material or the bourgeois life, every writer is being driven by this hunger, this hunger is the fodder for all art creations, a writer’s short life expires chasing Keats’ ‘immortal bird’ (art, aesthetics?).

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Till the time the readers do not do away with the fixed methodology of the historians and professors, and till the time they do not employ their own senses in reading literature, such rumours, handicaps, and literary fallacies will continue to prevail. The indivisibility of literature and culture can only be achieved when the reader and writer are honest and free from prejudices – writer-reader – literature – culture.

It is in this regard that I strongly oppose the history of literature. History is the antagonistic commentary of the oppressor and the oppressed. Dear Karl was partially right in his inference of the matter. Literature has little connection with history. Philosophy and society may have their histories. Despite the ideological contradiction, these subjects have a fixed goal, one which life does not have – in cases where the discourse becomes a wrestling match, it loses its potency and becomes a bunch of jargon.

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Just like life, literature and poetry do not have any fixed goal – all the goals dissolve into an intense vagueness and progress towards the eternal truth. This truth does not appear equally to everyone – one plunges into this truth with his special consciousness and tears it up to establish the ultimate personal truth.  The individual waits with his shirt button open even on the freezing winter nights. Unnoticed, the truth of art starts living in with him.

 

(4)

 

‘What is poetry?’ From time immemorial, rhetoricians and theoreticians from Bangladesh, India, and the world – Aristotle, Horace, Anandavardhana Avinavagupta –have written a large number of books with or without understanding (why else would one refute the view of another, what are the theories and what is there to object?) poetry’s characteristics and specialties. They judge poetry from different points of view, they plunge into it with singular passion – they dissect it into pieces for their investigation – somewhat like how a social scientist judges and explains various social events or a tourist who stands at a safe distance and looks into a mist-covered lake, enjoying its view with naked eyes or with a binocular. Classicism, Romanticism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstractism, Impressionism, Cubism – these people have fathered these hellish isms at different points in time. And huge establishments based on these isms have grown up and are still growing, antagonizing true poetry.

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There must be a distance between poetry and criticism – in fact, criticism is not possible without this definite distance – it is therefore clear that critics can never be one with poetry, perhaps such is not their intention. And because they cannot do so (T S Elliot is no exception), academics till today fight over the questions of what is poetry and what are its actual characteristics and specialties – so-called critics and reviewers like psychiatric patients are bringing forth ever more complex theories on poetry and are becoming the laughing stock for poets and their readers. I cannot think of rhetoric and poetic investigations as anything apart from ‘bourgeois mannerisms’.

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Nothing is more dangerous to poetry than age-long ‘formal’ discussions based on a particular ism or a particular theory. Jibanananda Das in his poem ‘Samarurho’ (‘Why don’t you write a poem on your own’ etc) has strongly ridiculed these self-important critics – in ‘Kobitar Katha’ he has warned us more than once about how this kind of criticism can be debilitating for the reader’s taste and poetry’s necessity.  

Poetry cannot be trapped within any form or viewpoint – poetry is life’s alternative – poetry is the living essence of our transient life. “the discovery of reality can only go forward if we abandon worn-out form” – Alain Robbe-Grillet. Every artist (or every poet in the larger sense) is desperate to confront the ultimate truth – they are eager to immerse themselves head-genitals-foot in the ocean of truth. They are destroying every construction of life and the world at every moment - championing personality through self-annihilation. 

Poetry is but one of the means to reveal this truth – other than this it has no significant role in man’s life. In the case of poetry, words like ‘best’ or ‘worst’ are disagreeable and misleading for the readers. The importance of poetry (for the poet, for the readers) depends on how deep into truth it leads the reader to. Therefore, poetry has no grades, writings that are of no use to the spirit of our lives and serve no purpose to quench our divine thirst are not poetry – serious readers are not even interested to know what they actually are.   

Ideology or the lack of it, ethics or the lack of it, philosophy or the lack of it – these kinds of ‘motives’ or statements are completely irrelevant to poetry – because no statement is self-sufficient and no ‘motive’ is without cause. Life did not start from any ideological statement.  No ideology can fully ‘justify’ life – in fact, it is life who makes man idealistic, and ushers him towards his personal ideology – he is declared ‘free’ from the pool of mass ideology. Life is the only ideology of life – freedom is poetry.  

 

 

(5)

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We want to reveal life as it is. This uncertain, complex irrecoverable distressed life – its cells and nuclei, its deafness, and its unnecessary intensity cannot be separated from our very veins and arteries. Beyond this, all constructions are lifeless to me. Perhaps, this is why the meaning of bourgeois literature is still not clear to us – we continue to question the relevance of bourgeois art and literature.  We are pasted to this ephemeral life sometimes like Yajnavalka’s wife and sometimes like bugs –

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We do not disregard what is happening within the boundaries of time, because largely we reside within the space-time circle – but it is not our duty to merely write down what is happening in the space-time warp in good language – we do not accept any plot. We want to pursue our ‘visions’ in a free world that is beyond our reality and imagination – this ‘vision’ ends all conflict between wrong and right amid a strange void. This vision – what it is – and what it is not – it frees the individual from these two states.

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We are neither hopeful nor hopeless. We do not plan before we start writing – there comes a time when the heads may be heavy with plans but not one line comes out and at other times a moment’s insignificant event explodes like an atom bomb, numbing our awakened consciousness and pulls out such things, which give us the incurable headache and self-torment as long as they are not penned down.  

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No writer has any words or ‘message’ for the world – Jesus – Buddha – Ramakrishna, no superhuman is the world’s saviour. ‘Saving’ is impossible. Saving is anti-creation. It is not in line with the world’s concept – and nobody has a clear correlation of it, except for that of a corpse.

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From this perspective, all our creations are merely bubble constructions – they cannot be judged with any theory – the ‘truth’ is changing every second – the writer is perceiving this change in his personality – and in this state, the distance between one line and the next is a life’s distance – those who overlook this distance and create continuity are not creating true literature – these are mere constructions.

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If someone wants to call what we write art, and if art is the only means to reveal the ultimate truth, then we are both outside and inside art simultaneously.

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Our collective present has changed, our future has stayed the same, our creative imagination is leaning towards an empty moan. All the happenings of this moment are awakened and deleted in front of our eyes – all our lives we are hanging from everything by the strings of this undeclared love. Our restlessness, our distraction, our belief, our indifference – we are moving towards the center of the earth amid all this. There is no judgment or explanation, nor is there gross hope – there is no hopelessness – all the faces and masks that are surrounding us at this moment – it seems that to follow this fluid wave of happenings is the artist’s vocation, their underlying form, the light, and shadows of their comings and goings – to watch this nameless journey of time is what the artist is destined to do.

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All the pillars of the past and present are breaking and dissolving into each other – how does an artist beautify the world, the world which is waiting for death every day, simply because it cannot die?

 

In a world where a being has no more places for joy, for active leisure, should die. No people can live outside beauty. – Carnets, Camus

 

It is because we are disconnected from poetry that this incurable disease, the modern fall of values, is eating up our existence like a nightmare. Life’s third meaning beyond technology and business becomes clear only in poetry. Even ‘philosophy’ is not being able to explain this immense void of feelings. Simply because philosophy is not indivisible like poetry – it cannot support the existence of this nameless death pang and divine consciousness simultaneously. Perhaps it is only poetry that will be able to grant immortality to the ephemeral life and the dying world.

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Hungry movement, Summer Manifesto, 1970