“Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way.”
- The Clearing, Tomas Tranströmer
This image of the assurance of unfamiliarity, of being comfortable in a space and time that is not my own, returns to me as a recurring dream. It is this impulse that hides behind the fluttering curtain of the conscious, this search for familiarity in strangeness that describes, for me, one kind of poetic drive. This is not a critical impulse. It does not seek explanation, or assessment. It starts with description, and in the act of christening it slowly builds a lexicon of place, time, and sense. I think of this act as artisanal, wrought with the careful fingers of the art director, or the sculptor, and swayed by the erratic affect of the poet.
Many years ago, I had written multiple drafts of a play entitled “The Elephant in The Room” (it eventually took another form, and has been enacted in various platforms). The narrative plugged itself into a mythological loophole. The drama revolved around Ganpati going into the forest to look for his human head. The possibilities of such a reinterpretation sparked ideas that were not from that time, but they were united in the universal anxieties of being human. I wanted to imagine Ganpati as the bumbling, indelicate, constantly hungry, and mortally anxious creature that he was. My ganpati was scared in the forest that arose around him. He was looking for a phone booth to call his mother. When Shiva danced the Tandav, even far away, the wifi scrambled, the network was briefly disturbed. The conspiratorial messages transmitted through fungi on tree root, the mysterious missives that were carried by the wind, the cackle of fearful birds, the pricking of the deer’s ear, or the odour given out by leaves to warn of a predator– everything went awry. The god, unsure of his divinity, started to discover the secret ecosystem of the understory, the messages passed between animals, insects, foliage and birds. The hum grew loud around him, asking him polite questions. The forest welcomed him, because of his elephant head, and his unabashed show of vulnerability, and assisted him in his search for meaning.
The Ganpati, I had imagined, was an anachronism. But isn’t that where the fun is?
***
Even Tranströmer’s forest is devilish, before he reaches the clearing, and finds his bearings, somewhat, and comes to terms with being lost:
The clearing is enclosed in a forest that is choking itself. Black trunks with the ashy beard stubble of lichen. The trees are tangled tightly together and are dead right up to the tops, where a few solitary green twigs touch the light. Beneath them: shadow brooding on shadow, and the swamp growing.
The mysterious landscape that Tranströmer describes with careful attention, before arriving at his clearing, is so precise that it transcends the particularities of its regional, geographic and even cultural associations. I can almost hear the quiet, insistent drone of the crickets, the ticker of the eternal night as urgent as a police radio, and a curious badger raising its head to countenance the newcomer.
The poem, untethered from its physical sense of place, also acquires meaning for readers, across the ages, recast in their own forests, their own undergrowths of dilemma and absolution. Tranströmer’s voice rings out with the quiet persistence of mother, like a gentle hand on my shoulder, telling me that it is alright to feel lost. We come into this world bawling, and through time, the world mirror this to us. Events in my own backyard constantly question the assumptions I have had about community, and empathy. They leave me in a maze. Art is a distraction- the sudden flap of incandescent polka dotted butterfly wings, on which the twilight pirouettes. And art making, is nothing less than world making.
I am fascinated by the imaginative power of certain poems whose visuality challenges the assumption that we can only conceive of realities that we have seen or experienced. I am thinking, for example, of Margaret Atwood’s poem This is a photograph of me.
***
Reader, imagine a piece of writing, like a tapestry, strung together with impossible images - a slow accumulation of scene that goes deeper and deeper into a vanishing point, much like a painting, but more. Every subdued emotion is a peach swathe that twinkles only in a particular slant of light. Impossible objects commune together comfortable in their dissonance, unimaginable tableux form in the crinkled edges of language.
This is the landscape of memory - because what is truth, but the transmission of a felt subjectivity? The power of the poet lies not in the measured witness of reality, but the impassioned telling of a story - this truth is deeper, it is the current of feeling. A poem is sometimes born, simply in the recounting of a landscape, that may not be tethered to the present, jumping temporalities in the space of a phrase, and eventually locating the subject, with the concentration of chaos.
Or maybe this could all be a pleasant dream… nothing more
I have returned to this astounding piece of writing several times, and I have always identified, in the end with the mammoth, feeling my tusks gradually sink into the sea water. I love the nonchalance with which the poet weaves dissimilar experiences. There are many allusions - artistic and literary - that come to mind but I will not share them with you and distort your readings. Briefly, one cannot not speak of the concrete structure of the poem that takes its already heady description and musings closer to the realm of painting. But then this poem does more then the ekphrastic. Text becomes more than a response to an image, the words themselves move, creating a form that is beyond the delineation of a thing with colour and line.
I am an admirer of Aswin’s quiet passion as a poet, and his precise, thoughtful takes on poetic impulses. They have been helpful in my own journey, and I am happy to share this poem on Poetly today, of a young poet, whose work I have loved and learned from, and I look forward to engaging with in the future.
Note: The poem has been previously published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-2021.
I wish you pleasant dreams, dear reader.
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