Reality 'Bites' with William Butler Yeats, Aniket Jaaware, Amlan Das Gupta
'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold'
An odd thing happened yesterday. As I was walking through a tree lined road, semal dropping from the canopy, an SUV swerved onto the road, right in front of me. Before I had the time to react, the middle-aged man at the wheel deftly slipped past me, without batting an eyelid. He was smiling. It was only when the car came dangerously close to the pavement that I saw the passenger beside him who was laughing as if she had just delivered a punchline. I enjoy seeing people laugh, or smile to themselves. This happens mostly by accident, on the streets of the city, and it pulls you out of your own immersed reality. The smile lightens the moment, and teaches you not to take yourself so seriously.
Anyway, when I noticed the person sitting beside the driver, I stopped in my tracks. I did a double take. Was I seeing right? The person sitting beside the driver seemed to be a woman who had just finished her workout. She was wearing a green hairband that made her hair bounce on her forehead as she talked animatedly. She was holding one of those decathlon sippers, and seemed to have just finished her workout. By the time, I was able to digest this stranger’s presence, the car had whizzed past.
I looked at the cloud of dust that trailed the car. I recognised this person. It could not be. She had left this world a few years ago!
*
To be honest, after that brief circuit of surprise, I did not make much of this event. I thought that perhaps my eyes were deceiving me. I am sure it was a person who resembled my friend. What was uncanny was that not only in physical presence, even in demeanour she seemed to have the same effervescent personality of my friend who had passed on. What a pleasant fiction this would be if it was really the same person, and if I was actually not mistaken. I thought of a world where dead souls came back for brief tours to their favourite haunts, with chosen guides who’d drive them around and listen earnestly to their jabbering. This thought, again, lightened the load I was carrying around in my head. I smiled to myself, trying to decide who I’d like to guide through this resort.
As a practice, I keep a list of 5 dead people who I’d like to meet and spend some time with. These are also the 5 people to whom I’d like to show my work - whose criticism, perhaps, I’d take seriously. (The art of giving and taking feedback is quite a rare one, and difficult to find these days. I mean, I do have friends who I show my work to, who are sensitive to the vulnerabilities of a poet, even while pointing out dissonances.) This constantly evolving list variously contains people like Nusrat, Shakespeare, or Wislawa Szymborska.
*
Sometimes this vision comes unannounced in my mind - It is a fall evening. Two cups of tea sit on a garden table, forgotten, along with a sheaf of papers that appear to be typewritten printouts of some poems. I am sitting with Wislawa, and we are talking about everyday things. There’s a light in our eyes, as I tell her about the reading where I met this poet whose biodata took longer to announce than the poems she read out. We do not talk of death, or war, or world peace. We sit together in the shared wonder of laughter. She is speaking with the enthusiastic ease of a person who has nothing to lose. I am trying hard to be a good listener, but I cannot hide my excitement…
*
I share with you two poems today. The first is well known – a contemplation on a world gone to waste, using an apocalyptic conceit formulated through myth and religion. The second is a parodic take on the first poem. I am happy to share the second poem with you today. It reminded me that one must not take oneself too seriously, and no text is sacred. Mischief is useful, both as structuring device and methodology for poets who reconstruct the past through language. Every work latches on to other works that have come before, in a palimpsest of ironic retellings. Every song must sound different in the singing. We must play, even with memory.
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