Sense comes before language. We feel before we think. The body has eyes. It jerks awake the way a forest does, when a two-legged enters the locus of its vision. The understory quivers with anticipation. Have you seen it - how the message is transmitted through leaf and vapour. Underneath the skin, below the breathing earth, something awakens. This is not alarm. The urgent message that is passed in the reedy silence of conspiracy, has legs. Not the pregnant pause before the coming of rains, but the muffled susuruss of whispered revolution. When it is voiced, it becomes emotion. This is the sound of the body asking a question.
The body enters space. The stiffening of hairs on the surface of skin, like the transparent blue haze around the surface of the screen, apprehends the world, in all its dubiousness. “When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves, it feels”* There is a music in this. We unravel days that are locked in stolen symphonies of dissent. Our bodies mould questions into shape. Perhaps this is what they mean, when they say that exercise is repair. How complicated, then, the work of the poet, who must describe what is inadmissible to the syntax of care, in the language of the caring.
***
My Ustad would say that alaap is the search for the most perfect pitch of every note. I think of writing in this way. The modality of ‘sawaal-jawaab’ births a peculiar relationship between two collaborators - a teacher and a student. Once, when I was singing a Tanseni Gurjari Todi composition to my teacher, I asked him about the relationship between this singing, and Tansen’s rendition to Akbar of this composition. Was it the same raag, across centuries, treading the same foliage, navigating the same waters, after all these years? all these ages? My teacher burst out laughing, and then, taking that serious expression reserved for the transmission of myth amongst learners, he said: “This is why it is called gharana”. I have found that the word tradition does not quite do justice to the meaning of “one after the other” that is subsumed in parampara. Nevertheless, that is the moment when I realised that questions open up a tear in the fabric of the everyday. It is in that anomaly that the new is born. But it is not agnostic to the old.
Writing, like christening, gives character to sensation. We find, in our stories, the correct names for feeling. Sometimes this correctness seams into art and in the synchronous moment of reader’s epiphany a crescendo is reached. The question resolves itself, again, as wordlessness. So many words strewn on the floor, so much water under the bridge. Is this not an argument for minimalism? Must we not hide this knowledge in a calculated consensus of literary silence?
But what is found, in the moment of encounter, when poetry alights in the reader’s mind - the rasik’s body - is beyond language. It suffices that a temporality emerges that is witness and arena, to both poet, and reader. This is why Tansen singing to Akbar, “Tero Bal Prataap”, echoes across 500 years of noise, clean as rage.
*Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual
It is almost the cruellest month. Hope you are finding space to write.
If you feel like responding, you can write back to poetly@pm.me.
I will write back, when I find the time, and the space. I hope the summer is kind.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
Note: Those, not in India, who’d like to support the work I do at Poetly, write to me - poetly@pm.me.
Thanks for reading Poetly ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.