Neruda's Passage To India
I first discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda in 2001. How I precisely came into the shade of his beautiful words I have forgotten. But I suppose it has something to do with love; more precisely I needed words to express things to a girl I was involved with then. So like countless other young people who have come under that Great Chilean’s spell, I religiously acquired and imbibed poems from “Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair” and “100 Love Sonnets”.
I read them to the girl; I was even was foolish enough to write some verses, as they say under the influence. And as is expected, those poems were insufficient as threads (not to mention as real breathing poems), and that threadbare love didn’t last. Perhaps this was because instead of a hundred poems I only managed to write a fistful of them in those early months of winter, and that boat was too porous to sail the stormy sea of uncertainty. But Neruda has stayed with me like a talisman. I read somewhere every dire experience is like the revelation of a new passage of the Minotaur’s maze at whose center the soul waits. Neruda then is that durable passage that ‘laughable’ love wrought, which I traverse through as I read his books, especially his “Elemental Odes”, whenever either the world or the word seems to have become too gloomy.
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Then few days ago, looking at some photographs of the monsoons in India reminded me of a passage from Neruda’s Memoirs describing the southern rain of his Chilean childhood. So I took down the book, and started looking it again. I saw that I had previously made notes on Neruda’s sojourn as a Chilean consular officer in the colonial subcontinent: Burma, India, Sri Lanka, and Java. This was when I decided to look into the question: what was Neruda’s passage to India like? How did he experience it? How did it impact him as a poet? In what fashion did the “Orient” seep into him?
The Britannica Encyclopedia on this period in Neruda’s biography:
“Yet his poetry was not a steady source of income, so he translated hastily from several languages and published magazine and newspaper articles. Neruda's future looked uncertain without a steady job, so he managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). For the next five years he represented his country in Asia. He continued to live in abject poverty, however, since as honorary consul he received no salary, and he was tormented by loneliness.
From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses, who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote Residencia en la tierra, 1925-1931 (1933; Residence on Earth). In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid, conventional lyricism of Twenty Love Poems, abandoning normal syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration, chaos, decay, and death that he recorded in a cryptic, difficult style inspired by Surrealism. These puzzling and mysterious poems both attract and repel the reader with the powerful and awe-inspiring vision they present of a modern descent into hell.
In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta), which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There he fell in love with a Dutch woman, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, and married her. In 1932 Neruda returned to Chile, but he still could not earn a living from his poetry.”
In a subsequent Paris Review interview (pdf file), Neruda when questioned as to what he remembered most from your years in India, replied,
“My stay there was an encounter I wasn’t prepared for. The splendor of that unfamiliar continent overwhelmed me, and yet I felt desperate, because by my life and my solitude were so long. Sometimes I seem locked into a Technicolor picture – a marvelous movie, but one I wasn’t allowed to leave. I never experienced the mysticism which guided so many South Americans and other foreigners in India; people who go to India in search of a religious answer to their anxieties see things in a different way. As for me, I was profoundly moved by the sociological conditions – that immense unarmed nation, so defenseless, bound by its imperial yoke. Even the English culture for which I had a great predilection, seemed hateful to me for being the instrument of the intellectual submission of so many Hindus at that time, I mixed with the rebellious young people of that continent; in spite of my consular post, I got to know all the revolutionaries – those in the great movement that eventually brought about independence.”
Also later in the interview when questioned in he wrote Residence when in India, Neruda revealingly added, “Yes, though India had very little intellectual influence on my poetry.”
to be continued
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Pankaj Mishra's "Oops! I did it again"
This NYT review of Pankaj Mishra's latest book "Temptations of the West" has allowed me, very easily I must say, to make up my mind not to disgorge any of my precious dead presidents to acquire it. The reason you ask? I am done with Mr. Mishra's peddling of his autobiography in nearly everything he writes. I really liked reading his backstory in his novel "The Romantics"; as an isolated reader in provincial 1980s Benaras; as a witness to the breakdown of Indian Universities into places of anarchy, violence, and lumpen politics; as someone who was trying to make his way through the intellectual wasteland of middle class India with its entire energies focused on "roti, kapada, and makaan". I even recommended the novel to friends because I felt that Mr. Mishra, in the voice of that novel's hero, spoke for quite a large number of Indians of a certain vintage, including myself.
Then my book-runner friend C, to whom I had praised his novel, presented to me Mishra's book on Buddha, which is not a book on Buddha. After reading it, I felt this book could have used the epigram of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": "What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either." Just as in the novel, in this book on the Buddha, we again get to meet Rajesh, the student dropout turned contract killer who "gets" Flaubert; we get evocations of a university falling into anarchy; we get to participate in Mishra's discovery of Edmund Wilson's body of work, and his subsequent brooding (why so much joylessness, Mr. Mishra? You are getting to read and write, dammit!) intellectual development. Now you can imagine my reaction when the above review begins to describe the contents of the latest book as:
"Mishra’s journey begins in the dusty reading room of a university in Benares, the ancient city on the Ganges, holy to both Hindu and Muslim. There he finds the works of Edmund Wilson and Gustave Flaubert, and briefly befriends an intelligent, frustrated young man named Rajesh, trying to make his way in a society riddled by bribery and nepotism."
This reaction further deepened after reading the book's first chapter that NYT was kind enough to include. To borrow from a title of another of Mishra's books, this was my "Dat is recycled butter chicken from Ludhiana, puttar! Tell us something new or shut the fuck up oye" moment. I am not saying that this book doesn't contain other revelations for someone like monkish-me, who constantly has to fight the 'temptations of the west', especially in the form of tanned legs in hot summers. It may very well have some fab writing later, but I am not putting any money in it.
Besides, a cursory glance at the other topics that Mr. Mishra is supposed to have touched upon in this book: Bollywood, Kashmir, Nepal etc, makes me suspect whether these are too are reheated columns and essays of his that have previously appeared elsewhere? I do remember reading a Bollywood piece called "Aspirers" he wrote for Granta that included snatches of conversation with Mallika - "If a chemical drug like Viagra is accepted by society and by the world to ignite desire, then what is the problem with my audio-visual drug called cinema which ignites desire?" - Sherawat (Wtf Mallikaji! Our beloved 'fillums' ne sont pas cinéma), as well as essays he wrote on Kashmir for the New York Review of Books - stuff that can be sourced by digging through this website. So Mishra babua, however much I admire you for who you have become coming from where you come from, you ain't getting no lovin' from me for this latest tome bro.
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To Russia, With Love
Yesterday, when I was at the public library to borrow holy paper wafers to bookbase (from freebase) on later, I spied a book of photographs in the new arrivals rack. A bright red piano with Moskova written in Cyrillic, irresistible. So I devoured it. I have never been to Russia, unless visiting a place imaginatively though literature counts. Consequently, Andrew Moore's photographs provide another superb tunnel to Russia, Rilke's spiritual homeland. From the quite pared down minimalism of "Ice Fishing, Vologda" to the baroque excess of the famed Amber Room in Tsarskoe Selo, Moore's camera swoops and dives, to hover lovingly and unsentimentally, over the Russian landscape. In this landscape, as can be expected, the human figure and face are completely subsumed, except in glimses such as this one of a family who call an abandonded missile base home. Through this process, Moore's photographs enable the viewer, for a moment, to be the man that Rilke wrote about in "The Book of Hours", thinking of Russia's open spaces:
"Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot."
-trans by Robert Bly
Perhaps, it is also time again for me to watch "Dr. Zhivago". I was in love with Julie Christie's "Lara" for weeks after I first saw this movie on TV many years ago. Oh, trivia note: Julie Christie was born in Assam, India.
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And this talk of beautiful women nicely brings us to this Vanity Fair article on the devilish (ref: Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita") nightclub scene in the capital of, what Granta in a recent issue called "The Wild East", Moscow. A section that particularly caught my eye:
"Karina, from Volgograd, is celebrating her birthday upstairs at the V.I.P. tables ringing the main dance hall. "All these girls come to Moscow," she says, casting her eyes at the sea of women below, many of whom have traveled great distances to hunt oilmen and those who own banks. "They're looking for a guy who will buy them a car and give them $100,000." Karina flicks her blond hair and it kaleidoscopes through all available light. "Not me. I came here for $10 million." In this society, it is mainly the men who practice the commerce. The fairer sex works the angles. It is clear from talking to Karina and others that these girls are not cheap. Instead of fighting for the Western ideal of gender equality, which is not an option, they have become super-feminine, exerting all the power a brutally beautiful woman can bring to bear, which is not inconsiderable.
"I like being taken care of," says Dunia Gronina, who owns a boutique shoe-and-accessory showroom that generates $5 million a year. To a certain mind, Russian women may be laboring under the yoke of patriarchy. But there is plenty of wisdom to go around. "Our moms, they say to us, 'The man is the head of the family, and the woman is the neck,'" Gronina says. "'Where the neck turns, the head looks.'""
The question is what will "feminists" have to say to these women? Are they "morally"/"ideologically" right in deploying what are obviously their strengths to a real situation for their own advantage? Questions. Questions. Tell me what you think.
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