'Austere Beauty'
Movement, Stillness, and the meaning of purpose
mornings are my favourite time of day. when the world sleeps i take to walking the streets of this city.
this morning, it started to rain as i stepped out of the threshold of my friend’s home. a steady drizzle punctuated my heavy trudge on the damp tar. dilli flickered a sleepy eyelid and turned its back to me. even space needs time - if only to catch the gossamer wings of a morning dream, before it dissolves into the office-traffic and smog smeared air of nizamuddin. in this part of town, sleep is swathed in the unspoken certainties of the pious, and the irrational anxieties of the prosperous.
i used to live beside this neighbourhood until a couple of years ago. my flatmate and i would go “house-watching” here during our evening strolls. in the peak of the Covid Lockdown, this area was, perhaps, at its most verdant. draped in amaltash and bougainvillea petal, the streets celebrated the absence of human parasites. the only sound that was discerned for miles was the pastel hum of spring, rendered like the evening azaan, between fallen leaves and disdained feathers. a dargah and four different historical structures from (dating back to older than the Mughal period) dot the contours of this neighbourhood.
when i cycled past them - while the virus wreaked havoc during the first and second lockdown - i remember reaching an understanding about the patience of brick and mortar. what violent upheavals and mystic epiphanies they must have seen - those rocks carried across the plains of central india to form the foundations of those grand mausoleums, places of worship, and leisure, and those marketplaces that must once have been abuzz with the excitement of a new capital. what songs of sorrow, and receding cries of short-lived peace lined the arched eyebrows of those monuments. how they must have waited in the sleeves of the everyday, for the ordinary to overwhelm them, for time to redden their skins.
they seemed to be taking their rightful place in the arena of the city now, emerging, tile by crystalline tile, their blemishes disappearing under the restoration scaffolding, their wings decked up in museum attire. this is how the present whitewashes the past, rewriting chaos with the velvet ink of heritage. but let us leave history to its sheltered slumber.
let us climb alongside the day, towards industry, and the illusion of purpose.
most mornings in this part of the city retain their demeanour of silence, only allowing interruptions from a few scattered assemblies of daily wagers, who’ve come early for their tea, or sanitation workers, dressed in green and brown, sweeping up the previous night’s refuse, and summer’s trappings. in the city, sometimes, you forget the meaning of silence. You learn to recognise it as solitude. because who does not give in to the romance of the body’s surge for cocoon?
everywhere is elsewhere. noise sheathed in the thrum of the self. i turn down the volume by paying attention to familiar objects, rendering them as strange in my appraisal - road signs, barricades, traffic signals that vehicles are just beginning to acknowledge. the drizzle has stopped, leaving small pools on the sides of the road; sometimes, bang in the middle.
it was as i was making the final turn towards the main road that i saw them. i did not apprehend them all at once. my eyes fell upon the first one as they descended the walls of an advocate’s imposing bungalow (at least that is what the sign by the main entrance said). i had to stop myself from stepping on its body, as it oozed onto the wet daambar; a translucent drip, graying into sight with the nervous persistence of an animal instinct for survival in the concrete jungle. i stopped immediately, and followed the progress of the earthworm. i cannot remember having seen one this long. a few centimetres away, another is making its way to the other side of the road; and another, and another. they curve slowly, towards a small pool, in asymptotic comradeship, heading to work just like me.
i stand there transfixed, trying to figure out where they came from, where they are headed, and what they are seeking out - this exodus of hermaphrodites. the why is easy. most of them seemed to have come out of the garden in the advocate’s bungalow, leaving the comfortable moist earth and gravel - towards moister climes? one of them crawls into a puddle and slides towards what might be a warmer corner. i see others follow suit, and as i look closely, adjusting my gaze to the locus of their wandering, i see a line of earthworms, thronging at various shrines of Varuna, separated by meters of urban detritus soggy from the dawn’s first gentle downpour.
earthworms move slowly, at the pace of punctuation. like the small hand of an antique clock, that is in continuous motion, not marking the discrete intervals of each second. they crawl, with purpose.
reader, i felt embarrassed as i stared as these sightless beings, whose only acknowledgement of my presence was a stray photosensitive shrug of cuticle, and a momentary shrivelling lest i trample on their inspired movement. i shivered under their quiet confidence. what aspiration! what work! and what leisure!
each aquiline form slanted towards a moist utopia, merely to be. they hurried across the tar moat that was the road, to arrive at their oases; some of them slid to the edge, to the shallower areas. i had to hurry to my place of work, so i could not follow their progress for too long. but my curiosity about their destinations was accompanied by the observation that the only end to their journey was a slight change of geography. they were loitering; gambolling - not even that. when they reached a place that their bodies agreed with, where, apparently their restless souls found peace - they stagnated into curled forms.
i remember a wildlife photographer once telling me about how the leeches in a particular part of Wyanad had started to abandon many of the old paths through the forests, as the urban tangle ate into the wildness; as the water started to get more polluted. you can tell that it is going to rain by looking at the threads of a wolf spider’s tunnel web, in the same way that you can tell the quality of a place’s water by checking for leeches in the puddles.
i began to think about purpose. about movement and stillness. i remembered an old poem i had written which had an “earthworm/scabbed by curiosity”. the last two lines of the poem housed its volta - “maybe moving is not always progress/ and standing is not always stagnation”, echoing the sthavara-jangama verse that Ramanujana had famously translated in the vacana collection Speaking of Siva. but this was something else entirely - a kind of stillness that was achieved through intentional movement.
the bodies of the earthworms told them to hasten slowly, to a place that was more…wet? whose light was kinder? whose sensory environment was more in equilibrium with the temperature of their animal anxiety? or maybe they had not evolved into worry. maybe their bodies were simpler, and therefore, more in tune with geological rhythms, more at odds with this solipsistic drive for capital and industry; maybe they were the ultimate critiques of the Anthropocene - oblivious to the chaos of development, and the over-productive haste of human desire.
i wanted to learn their slowness, their sage, stoic wisdom of persistence, their comfort with stillness. i wanted to move, like they did, with a surety of purpose, towards a place that was more quiet, more cloistered, away from the buzz of the everyday. i wanted to wear the earth, like they did, as an overcoat that protected their unsung labour from the human insistence towards busyness. i wanted to organise my days around this primitive stillness - a metaphor for fanaa; and the silence of thought.
since the first drops of sun fell on their coats, until this moment, i have been labouring to find the language to describe that pursuit, and that arrival. i have not found the words still. i feel like invoking Wislawa - “Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,/ then labour heavily so that they may seem light”.
but there is another voice whose soft chant rang through the corridors of my worry-filled brain today. another poet, whose words have been with me these last few days. one of her poems sat in the soft light of the afternoon today, on my laptop screen - and i understood the quiet knowledge of her assurance. i saw, as she did, the need for brevity, and a minimal nous.
i share with you, today, a poem by Louise Glück.
austere beauty - that was one of the things the Nobel Committee said in their citation that summarised her life’s work with inadequate but prescient language.
nourish. sustain. attack.
read it again, dear friend. Glück’s poems have a tendency to wait in the wings for years, before settling on the lips of the mind, like silt at the mouth of an ancient river.
You could read 3 more of her poems in an old Poetly commentary that I had written around the time when she got the Nobel Prize, here.
I hope her poems give you the peace of the poet whose spring poems, were autumn poems. perhaps i will share some of them, the way I see them, in the next commentary.
Note: The deadline for submissions for the Meanwhile Anthology of City Poetry (and other narrative forms) has passed. The window has officially been closed. If there are people who have just found out about the call, please write to me: poetly@pm.me. I cannot promise that your submission will be accepted, but still….no harm in reaching out, no? :)
Thankyou for reading!
The world is too much with us nowadays. The country is going through a series of unsettling events. I hope you are finding silence, and the space to create amidst all this. yes. and also, the courage to resist. sometimes writing, or making art is also an act of rebellion - i hope you are able to see this, as i do, and find peace, accordingly.
Do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments.
I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.