Love as Research

E. V. Ramakrishnan

In the neverending spiral staircase of perception, art is the secluded window that hides behind its dusty blinds an uprising of light. This light is blinding. It stands at the threshold of something beautiful - a new way of imagining the world. I think, what we seek most is the ability to create an alternative vision of reality. Maybe this is why artists love dreams, and metaphor.

The promise of poetry is not originality, but a fresh gaze that looks on the same weathered reality with the innocence of curiosity. Of course, readers see a kinship in accounts of love poetry, but one must marvel at the perseverance of poets- every new love poem, is a scraggy, almost undecipherable scratch on a towering granite face filled with centuries of lovers’ conversation.

The labour of the poet is the assimilation of a layered experience, and faithful translation. EVR’s espousal of these arguably diverse worlds of romance and “scholarship”, convey, not only an honesty of experience, but an energy in its recreation, creating a new language, shorn of extravagance. The tonality, almost like one proposing a particularly opaque line of argument, even steals the formal equivalent of an involved academic joke - “I fumble and misquote, as I learn more and more, about your less and less”.

I woke up this morning dreary about the state of the world. I wanted to share something happy, something beautiful. As I read this, I smiled and thought - as long as lovers rediscover the universe through each other’s eyes, poets will write love poetry, and the earth’s unrolling into the darkness of space will ring with the hope of music.