A city untimely
'The notion of some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing...'
Our bane is that we roam effortlessly through the lushness of language. Not as poets or artists, but as membranes whose tiny particles -sensitive to the light- scatter when it streams. We can’t help but allow ourselves to be sensitive to beauty. It is a wound, really, that flowers when the eye of the mind collides with a thing that makes it stop. And then the deepening…
Damn. As I write this, that particular conjunctive pulls a line from nostalgia’s dusty workshop, and throws it into the front porch of consciousness. It is a line from a poem that has my heart. It’s strange, actually, come to think of it, but the man who wrote it has been returning to me like a mischievous shadow in the last few days - not with a bang but a whimper. Ah, well, it is the first day of the cruellest month. Forgive me then, this brief stop at this much frequented, much loved junction. If you haven’t before, read it out loud:
Ah. Sod it, I’ll talk to you about lushness of language and all that, some other time. I mean, I can’t even.
If you propped up Eliot’s words with the gentle cushion of your voice, then you might be forgiven for slipping into reverie as the images gather, and the city suffuses the heart with the insidious devilry of its meandering syntax. What is it to return to a much loved piece of writing, a familiar hum, whose music never ceases to amaze?
Every literature student reads Eliot’s Preludes, but it is usually overshadowed by Prufrock, Wasteland, or Hollow Men, and you will find that the poem has been murdered with analyses of modernist impulses, and the drudgery of urban life and so on. But as I read it today, I am again transported to that silence fogging up the window, that revolving city of ancient women in vacant lots. I am reminded of the first time I read it, but it lives in my mind not as a text read, or even absorbed, it lives as experience.
As I read it, I can hear myself nodding, waiting for the lighting of the lamps. I smile as the morning comes to consciousness, and I notice the sudden surge of breath as the night reveals the thousand sordid images that the soul constitutes. I mean, my attention does waver, in the fourth section, because my soul is stretched tight across the skies in Nizamuddin, and Muhammad Ali Road, and Gokul’s Bar and Restaurant, where ‘four and five and six o’clock’ sees the bemused weariness of undergrad eyes safe in their saucy haze of youth, trudging quietly to Churchgate station to get bun maska, striking up conversations with daily wagers preparing for the day. The students smell of vomit, and stale beer too, but also of the carelessness of comfort, even blue-faced optimism in the sweaty drawl of the city’s monotonous underbelly (Is this just Bombay?)
At the time it was written, many commentators lauded it as a critique, a work that undressed the city’s alienating impulses, the tragedy of industrialisation, and the existential angst that curled through the empty corridors of a melancholic, jaded soul. The imagery of Christ on the cross has been read as metaphor into soul stretched tight across the skies. But as I read Preludes now, I feel like it is more than that. Its emotional centre is in a coming to terms, even a quiet celebration of the changing present?
The work opens up a world of imaginary and sometimes valid readings, simply because of its simplicity of ascent. Literarily speaking, there are no metaphors here, just adjectives! It actually portions out a slice of quivering soul, creating fertile loam, where we can plant our desire. This work is not opaque, it tickles the skin at several unimaginable places, but it forms slowly in the revolving gaze of an uncertain certainty.
With what steady deftness, and control, Eliot paints the hues of the evening. With what nonchalance he lets the city drop its frock. With what tenderness he watches the naked body turning. It is in this description, simply, that the world of his imagination rises in us, not in arbitrary truisms, or great zen-like insight. Even when he turns to contemplation, when he muses about deeper things, it is with the hesitation of one who has asked in some other uncertain haze, ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’
**
Going back to my journey through the poem, my mind wandered momentarily in the fourth section. I had forgotten, briefly, that anticipated, beautiful, beautiful line which says everything in a flurry of repetition - ‘The notion of some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing.’ And honestly, when I read it today, again, I unravelled, and I had to hold on to the railing of the revolving cities, the ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots. That line is not his voice, what he embodies, but what his careful persona is too nervous to articulate, even as they perceive their own impulses, their being ‘moved by fancies that are curled/ Around these images, and cling’. Because they can only speak about the world with the subjectivity of their perch, this speaking takes the place of the real manifestation of the thing.
How he balances the tip of the universe as the poem slowly takes angdai. Perhaps it is artistry that blunts the edges of the hard labour of the working class, that sanitises the grime of the walls of mills and factories. But it is spontaneity, I believe, that thrives in it, that doesn’t lament, that lets it quietly flow. It is not high tragedy, but the slow watching of a thing that is both distant, and near - near enough to be flickering against the ceiling.
It is this quality of Eliot’s writing that most attracts me. However, assured he is in his criticism, whatever power he allowed himself as one of the ‘greats’, is subsumed in his verse (not always, but mostly). He doesn’t presume. His consciousness hasn’t really congealed into opinion. Even his city, his conscience of a blackened street, is impatient to assume the world. This is what draws me into the conversation. This tentative question mark that unravels as a heap of broken images.
I am unhappy, momentarily, that he is not here so we can sit and talk about tobacco trails, and the frothing sea, and mermaids singing. I want to ask him if the light of the winter evening is any different now, and how. I want to go with him through certain half-deserted streets, and muttering retreats, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.
Dher Saara Pyar :)
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