Earth: A Wandering

 

 

 

Alfred Kentigern Siewers

 

Earth is at once both symbol and reality: both a planet with a proper name and a substance, humus, from which the human emerges in participation, along with many of our fellow travelers in the physical world – animals, plants, and others. It is thus also both a wandering and a grounding – and most of all, perhaps, a wondering, at what environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz in a new study of the ongoing life of noetic Christian tradition in environmentalism calls ‘the heavenly beauty of Earth’ (Foltz, 2012). Pre-moderns and non-moderns probably lived and articulated this more particularly than moderns do with our more abstract GreenSpeak. But we all experience the conjunction of meanings of earth at some level. The modern West often expresses it through a type of post-medieval understanding that re-centers us in a medieval middle on Earth, part of the original impetus behind Romanticism. Whether it’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s association of his retro-medieval Shire with Appalachia (Davenport, 1997); the medievalism enabled by a cyberspace that simultaneously removes us from the Earth and enables us to engage different time periods and cultures more simultaneously: or personal traditions that re-form community with Earth, as we weave them from our scholarship through the interstices of our academic lives or arts: we connect with actual people and physical environments on Earth and in earth as both refugees from the modern and ambassadors to it, enmeshed in that which we seek to proclaim.

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As I walk through a last remnant of old-growth forest in Pennsylvania looking for our annual church Fourth of July picnic, passing through shady groves of hemlock trees amid brooks habited by bears, Amish teenagers, and, in earlier days, the nature writer Euell ‘ever eat a pine tree?’ Gibbons, I am reminded of the retro-medieval Forest of Arden.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the usurper duke’s wrestler Charles asks the dispossessed and out-of-favor Orlando, ‘Come, where is the young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 1.2.296).

But Orlando is thrown to earth in a different way than the duke and wrestler envision.

He flees the court for Arden. There he begins carving love poems to Rosalind on trees, in a ‘green world’ in which, as the duke-in-exile remarks, human life ‘exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (2.1.299).

Arden, a disappearing forest in the Warwickshire precincts of Stratford-on-Avon, itself becomes a kind of sylvan haunt in the play, written during the time of the Enclosure movement.

Such remnant woods around England had become places where an outlaw forest economy found temporary refuge, while an expanding British Empire cut them down for ships, privatized pasturage, and witnessed a new pastoralism.

Phantoms of the Middle Ages like Robin Hood haunted such woods, while vanishing into Elizabethan stories. These forests of the imagination exemplified C.S. Lewis’ curmudgeonly remark while giving birth to his Oxford History of English Literature tome (a painful project he labeled by acronym ‘the oh hell’) that England had no Renaissance because of its insular medieval continuities (Lewis, 1954, 55–56; Coghill, 1965, 60–61).

Yet in Arden’s ‘green world’ of imagination, the denizens of Shakespeare’s forest (a locality confusable in name also with both Ardennes woods in France and biblical Eden) find empathy not only for crying deer, but for each other, ending in a metonymy of marriage rites as well as a crossing of the human and non-human.

What the exiled duke calls ‘this wide and universal theater’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.7.135) of Arden becomes in its engagement of the non-human, a place of experience of earth apart from the human conventions of the court.

In its back-and-forth focus between the ‘green world’ and human society, Arden comes to typify what environmental philosophers (glossing Heidegger) distinguish as earth differentiated from the world of human cultural constructions: ‘The other side of nature,’ the phusis that simultaneously both hides and discloses itself. Yet earth spans the real if ghostly Arden of Warwickshire, as well as the type of older ‘green world’ associations of English folklore identified by the critic Northrop Frye (Frye, 1949), rooted in both the mythological ‘Celtic’ Otherworld and the transplanted Desert of early Christian monasticism.

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The integration of the real, imaginary, and symbolic in this mysterious sense of earth echoes the American Pragmatist Charles Peirce’s pioneering work in ecosemiotics. In Peirce’s model, the process of semiosis, or meaning-making (for him a definition of life), could involve a nature-text, an outward-facing triad of sign, environment and meaningful landscape, beyond de Saussure’s more arbitrary and internalized binary of signified and signifier (Maran, 2007). Landscape, as a meaningful symbolic overlay of earth, thus integrated the contexts of reader and author, while relating them directly to text and physical environment. The earth itself then reads as a nature-text, but always beyond our full comprehension, since we ourselves are allegory in the text.

Arden’s ecosemiotics of ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything’ thus provides context, grounding, and redefinition for Jaques’ famous notion in the play that ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women, merely players’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.1.16–17; 2.7.305). Linking that stage to a physical environment offers earth to Orlando not only as ground of humiliation, and not just Jaques’ placeless theater, but as experience of place leading to what deep ecology terms self-realization in the environment of earth. Deleuzean terms take it further into a rhizomic realization. And pre-modern Christian traditions literally and figuratively offer us a vision of the cross between the immanent and the transcendent, the anthropomorphic and the cosmic.

^***

When the Apollo 8 astronauts looked back on our planet from lunar orbit in 1968 and recited the Creation account from Genesis, they offered perhaps the most famous attempt to subsume ancient traditions of earth into the world of modern technology. But their words still evoked a pre-modern sense of our planet as mystery: ‘In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.’ In Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of Genesis 1, the terms used for ‘earth’ integrated meanings of essence and element, a span referenced here in the term ‘Earth.earth.’ Medieval schoolmen later split that relationship, demarcating essence and existence, supernatural versus natural, as if trying to forget the living, integrative metaphor of the earth mother, Gaia, referenced by earlier church fathers.

Earth to the ancients meant a realm including land and sea, ultimately planet and soil, native country and the dust of Genesis, from which humans were energized by God’s breath, pneuma, in Greek meaning wind and spirit, as well as breath. In medieval Greek usage, following the Septuagint γ (from which also developed the root of geology, geometry, geography, and geophilosophy, not to mention Gaia), ‘earth’ metaphorically stood also for the human mind, the realm of material things, the Promised Land, and heaven, following references in Psalms (Lampe, 1961, s.v.).

And the living breath from God in Hebrew and Greek in the clay or dust was related to earth by more than just simple infusion to early exegetes of Genesis. Its pneuma entwined the logoi of the speaking-into-being of Creation, in which logos could mean at once harmony, word, discourse, story, reason, and purpose. The kalos, or goodness, of Creation referenced in the Septuagint Genesis, likewise referred at once to the beautiful and the good, also spanning the physical and the spiritual. A speaking or breathing of harmonies, pre-moderns realized, involved chanting or music. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century declared ‘the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony of varied shapes and colors with a certain order and rhythm’ (Gregory of Nyssa, 1999, 27–30). He identified music with the spoken word of God’s Spirit-breath as an essential if dynamic pattern of earth. Music, like a Deleuzean ‘body without organs,’ or colors, as in the early Irish and Native American colors of the winds, span the physical and the spiritual with an energy. The musical description of the logoi echoes this verse from the Wisdom of Solomon: ‘For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony, like as in a harp notes change the nature of the tune, and yet are always sounds’ (LXX 19:18; emended from Brenton, 1851). St. Basil of Caesarea described the aerial waters and the deeps as both singing hymns of praise to God’s glory – reflecting one another chiastically on the second day of creation, even as man in the image of God in a sense reflects the divine on the sixth day of Creation in Hebrew parallel poetics (Basil of Caesarea, 1999, 71). Music or chanting is a way to indicate the iconographic incarnation of the cosmic logoi in the Creation story, as energy but also as metonymic breath of the Spirit (pneuma), so to speak, the same Spirit that Basil refers to as ‘cherishing’ the waters (using the Syriac version of Genesis), vitalizing seeds of life in the sea as if breathing on them. Man himself is described in corporeal terms as a musical instrument for the nous or energy of the soul/spirit, shaped in the image and likeness of God, the image of God being the Logos in whom man is made. And while articulating a sense of divine logoi as cosmic music, Basil differentiates such cosmic semiosis from the Classical ‘music of the spheres.’ In the latter, to Basil, the human mind dualistically could be considered the objectifying observer-conceptualizer of the music-generating spheres, rather than a liturgical instrument of the very networks of cosmic semiotics that constitute human reason. The latter for him is the dominion of human beings in Paradise over the earth, but in harmonizing semiosis (the making of meaning) rather than arbitrary control. And the human body is not the only participant in that cosmic music of meaning-making. Basil describes the aerial and terrestrial waters as singing hymns, and the Spirit’s cherishing of the waters brings forth life. And humans as cosmic musical instruments interweave color as well as sound in their sub-creation. St. Gregory, associating color with music in describing the cosmic harmonies, evoked hues as virtues, which overlay Creation with layers of incarnational qualities associated with divine likeness (Gregory of Nyssa, 1994, 391).

Earth.earth shares much in common with what could similarly be called Nature.nature. Nature, from the Latin natura, mysteriously means both the essence of something and of all of us, both something enveloping and outside of us, and an organic presence that has emerged naturally through nativity. Similarly, earth apophatically remains both more and less physical than what we mean today by ‘world’ as a globalized human semiosphere, or bubble of meaning. The latter incorporates multitudes of virtual individual Umwelts (the term coined by the Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century for ‘meaningful environment of an organism’, foundational to biosemiotics). Uexküll, too, heard them singing: ‘The countless Umwelts represent the keyboard upon which nature plays its symphony of meaning…not constrained by space and time. In our lifetime and in our Umwelt we are given the task of constructing a key in nature’s keyboard, over which an invisible hand glides’ (von Uexküll, 1982, 78).

In the semiotics of earth, Umwelts gather into larger semiospheres, including human cultural communities and temporalities (such as overlays of Jewish, Byzantine, Chinese, Julian, and Gregorian calendars sharing the same physical environment). Semiospheres in turn can overlap within ecosemiospheres in eco-regions (such as the peasant-tended wooded meadows of Estonia, Native American-managed prairies of the Upper Midwest, or the urban ecosystems of New York City’s archipelago, celebrated in Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale [Helprin, 2005]). Ecosemiospheres overlap in the Earth.earth. But our own poetics don’t often perceive, celebrate, or experience such overlapping realms of meaning. In the twenty-first century we may still occasionally speak in 1960s space-age terms of ‘planet Earth,’ or even more awkwardly, ‘Spaceship Earth.’ But always, as in the iconic Disney nature documentary Earth, our technological outer-space iconography of earth since the 1960s projects a crisp bright mimetic concept from the outside, a machino-morphic ecosystem of quantitative inputs and outputs. This ‘real’ image, now digitalizable between our iPhone fingers and iPad palantiri (similar to what we used to do between our real fingers with the moon in the sky as children, as if the optical-illusion hotdog between digits), spins around in our electronic extensions, only to disappear in technological magic tricks. So too with the Earth.earth, as Stephen Hawking advocates space colonization to save humanity, leaving behind a trashed planet as we search for more galactic landfills. Technology as a philosophy of Creation erases it. But, in the service of a love for Creation (of which the pre-moderns remind us), the same technology (more as personal techné or craft) can help extend our engagement with the Earth.

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Living at a cultural distance from high-tech centers likelier to follow Hawking’s vision of the Singularity, our home lies in the central Susquehanna Valley, which some geologists call one of the oldest valleys on earth, and some political commentators unflatteringly call Pennsyltucky, amid the rolling hills and larger ridges and mini-mountains of the northern Appalachians, itself one of the oldest mountain ranges. The Appalachians formed a modern model for Tolkien’s retro-Middle-earth, Migarr or Middangeard, a northern European medieval image of Earth embraced by the roots and branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil linking different worlds. The Susquehanna River survived various types of primordial foldings related to the movement of continents and the swallowing of part of it by the sea into the lost estuary now known as the Chesapeake Bay. The cosmic tree of the Iroquois in this region morphed into the peace tree of Onondaga Lake, now a Superfund Cleanup site. And while there are no millennia-old Sequoia trees in this eco-region, near us grow the old-growth hemlock groves of Tall Timbers nature preserve, once home to the nature writer Euell Gibbons and now a favorite haunt of Amish teens on buggy dates. To enter into it, as we do for Fourth of July church picnics and family hikes, is to experience a real-world green-world peace that evokes Shakespeare’s Arden.Eden in Penn’s Woods. Nearby the renowned trout of Penns Creek run past an old Boy Scout camp (Karoondina, ‘land of shining waters’ in Delaware), still groaning with summer campers. If there are no salmon of wisdom, there are plenty of fly-casting fishermen.

All this, water and worn-down mountains and woods, in a watershed paradoxically worried now both by gas-drilling fracking and declining river towns, is the earth. From the small plot of enclosed land my wife gardens behind our river-view townhouse in ‘downtown’ Lewisburg (population 5620, give or take a few births and deaths since the last census), to the polluted mud deposited by the river outside our door when it floods and turns our neighborhood into a Venetian-like scene, to old oak trees of the grove in the hilly center of the college campus down the street, and into Amish farmland farther west, this all too is the earth.

Traveling out that way to bike and to get to the rural house-chapel we attend in Beavertown (population 870) on Beaver Creek, we skirt horse-drawn carriages as we go up and down through the rich farmland of West Union and Snyder Counties. The late Davy Jones of the Monkees moved to Beavertown, to find refuge from rock n’ roll celebrity, on a horse farm whose landscape undoubtedly reminded him of rolling countrysides in his native Britain. It’s forgiveable to compare the countryside to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire as well. Tolkien, enamored of America’s archaic Appalachia while seeking refuge from the mechanized destruction of earth in twentieth-century European warfare, drew on a Kentucky friend’s lore for the Shire as the heartland of his twentieth-century Arden in Middle-earth. Names of Hobbit families, their love of tobacco, and speech and lifestyles, draw on the culture of an Appalachian state.

The Susquehanna in our Appalachian valley remains a sacred river in native tradition, interconnected with all the waters of the world, according to river steward Gere Reisinger, a naturopath of Seneca descent, who keeps watch over the hyper-polluted old industrial and coal region of the Susquehanna’s North Branch, known as the Wyoming Valley (Brubaker, 2002, 68). Mormons also hold sacred the river, where they first began their baptisms, and the watershed offered Edenic refuge too for Slavic Eastern Christians along with their Inferno. Slavic immigrants often died in the mines of its watershed but founded Holy Trinity Monastery, whose grounds at a cypress marsh near Cooperstown dip into the farthest edge of the Susquehanna’s headwaters, appropriately, in Jordanville, NY, named for the sacred river of Israel by now-vanished Baptists there.

The urban archipelago of New York City’s islands (population 8,175,133), or the ‘end’ of the river in the Chesapeake near Annapolis’ historic mini-urbanity, both seem a long way from local frameworks of earth in the mid-Susquehanna Valley, but are only each about 3 hours away by car. The mythical headwaters are more distant, about 4 hours by expressway, less time than it takes earth to flow in the river from the headwaters to our mid-valley confluence of the West and North branches. At the headwaters, Otsego Lake still opens up a clearing in imaginary endless Eastern Woodlands, as it did under its name of Lake Glimmerglass for Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper’s legendary green world, and in the pioneering nature writing of his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper. In summer the pristine green Doubleday field of the Baseball Hall of Fame coexists with the lawn that marks the site of the Cooper manse, a traffic jam of American ‘green world’ mythology where a statue of James Fenimore broods over crowds visiting the baseball museum but not him.

It is all of course both the same and different earth, and Earth, as the overgrown garden that I tended with my grandfather as a boy in a backyard in inner-city Chicago, listening to his memories of growing up on a nearby farm swallowed by the city, fantasizing my own Eden in a raspberry patch amid grids of streets flowing downtown to the Loop from out of Thomas Jefferson’s right-angled head, shooting the occasional rapids of a lost diagonal Indian trail. Chicago’s grid, now featuring sodium streetlights blocking the stars and security cameras focusing us back on ourselves in the self-proclaimed ‘city in a garden,’ like myself, and the Susquehanna Valley, are all earth and the Earth, but different worlds amid it. As in Yggdrasil’s entwinements, the worlds entangle both rhizomically and arboreally, as in the cosmic tree in Genesis, however bifurcated by the objectifying gaze of Adam and Eve.

Martin Heidegger helped apply his friend Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics to views of the earth, and while in postwar isolation in a Black Forest cottage helped lay the groundwork for current environmental philosophy, despite his politically reprehensible past. Heidegger described Earth as the region of the withholding of what he termedphusis, the mystery of nature that is not objectively present Being. As environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz glosses Heidegger today, ‘The earth is that whence phusis arises… the closed and self-secluding region that ultimately eluded Greek ontology… Nature as earth is not primarily that “from which” things are made but rather that “whence” self-emerging, self-unfolding, and self-opening arise and “unto which” they recede… The earth allows coming-forth’ (Foltz, 1995, 136).

That ultimately postmodern view of the earth finds suggestive parallels in the ninth-century Periphyseon by the early Irish philosopher John Scotus Eriugena. He defined Nature as both being and non-being, and earth (terra, land or region) as a ‘mystic name’ signifying the restored wholeness of nature, imbued with the divine energies, in theophany or divine manifestation (Eriugena, 1987, 589). ‘Our bodies are placed on this earth or surrounded by this air…bodies within bodies’ like ‘the fish in the sea’ (Eriugena, 1987, 70). His exegesis in his Periphyseon, Book 4, Chapter 4, compares Christ’s Resurrection to a re-synergized ‘earth of nature,’ or ‘His earth,’ uniting earth and Paradise as non-objectified process, in an experiential dialectic of apophasis:Paradise is not a localized or particular piece of woodland on earth, but a spiritual garden sown with the seeds of the virtues and planted in human nature, or, to be more precise, is nothing else but the human substance itself created in the image of God, in which the Tree of Life, that is the Word and wisdom of God, gives fruit to all life; and in the midst of which streams forth the Fountain of all good things, which again is the Divine Wisdom. … In this intelligible Paradise God goes walking. (Eriugena, 1987, 500)

Eriugena throughout the Periphyseon uses the Latin term terra – earth, land, or region – as a mystical name for Creation when experienced in relation with Paradise through the Tree of Life. Terra in its energized (or, as we might term it, non-objectified) state is for him ‘the bliss of eternal life and the stability of the Primordial Causes, from which all things which are have their origin…the fertile soil of the Primordial Causes’ (Eriugena, 1987, 520–521). The primordial causes are Eriugena’s adaptation of the logoi that St. Maximus the Confessor developed as activities of the Logos. In their effects as theophanies, these ‘word-harmonies’ interpenetrate and emerge from the earth. The earth thus functions in a sense as the ultimate Deleuze-Guattarian-style ‘plane of immanence,’ a relational sense of desire as different from Western possessive desire of lack as psychoanalytic models are from the Tao, while also however participating in transcendent meaning.

If earth, like Shakespeare’s Arden, is a palimpsest of layered memories and physicalities, words flickering in and out of metonymy, the divine logoi (or harmonies) are typed in some respects by today’s ecosemiotics. They open a sense of the dominion given unfallen humanity in the earthly garden of Paradise (which, restored, spans the earthly and the heavenly) as reason in the sense of harmony – an experiential semiosis constituting the natural symbolism of the body as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1970). ‘All living things are critics,’ interpreting signs, as Kenneth Burke noted in the opening of his Permanence and Change (Burke, 1984, 1). Modern physics, in notions of the multiverse, quantum entanglements and the anthropic principle, likewise emphasizes potential relationality in the cosmos that turns our abstracting old scientific matrix of sociobiological time on its head. Resulting postmodern notions of temporality and non-temporality oddly remind us of the more ancient and personal senses of Earth.earth as experience.

C.S. Lewis, translating medieval and Renaissance notions of planets into fantasy and science fiction, included in his space trilogy the idea that each planet hosts an embodying spirit, an Oyarsa. Although Earth’s angel is ‘bent,’ a.k.a. Satan, a figure of what in modern terms might be called the objectification of Earth, ‘There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth,’ explains the hero Ransom (a space-traveling philologist loosely based on Tolkien, in the same way that Tolkien loosely based Treebeard on Lewis). ‘And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a Heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these early wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods’ (Lewis, 1996, 313). But if the chief spirit of our objectified ‘silent planet’ was ‘bent,’ a.k.a. the fallen angel, then who is the pre-modern type of Earth.earth, originally good and beautiful? A feminine figure of Mother Earth, in various forms, becomes today reconfigured in the Gaia Hypothesis, as advanced by the late biologist Lynn Margulis among others. The complementarity of biological sex becomes a symbolic reality, subverting social modern constructions of binarized gender and of essentialized/consumerized sexualities, in experience of Earth.

To early medieval Christians, such mystery of a feminine-gendered earth resonated bodily in the figure of the Mother of God, identified in Byzantine hymns as the noetic Paradise, Jacob’s Ladder spanning earth and heaven, containing the Creator in her womb, while contained in God. Luce Irigaray has noted how a double-enfolding landscape of the female body models a landscape in consonance with nature that is both being and non-being, but in personal bodily ways (Casey, 1998, 321–330). Iconography identified the Mother of God with the enclosed garden, the ‘park’ at the root meaning of the biblical word Paradise, the garden and the life-giving stream of Eden, both bride and Mother of God, and in a sense thus transforming the nature of both the human and the divine. In the seventh-century words of St. Andrew of Crete: ‘Conception without seed; nativity past understanding, form a Mother who never knew a man; childbearing undefiled. For the birth of God makes both natures new. Therefore, as Bride and Mother of God, with true worship all generations magnify thee’ (Matthewes-Green, 2006, 179). The Mother of God, at once the Bride of God, turns the sense of Earth.earth inside out. Our sense of both the natures of God and humanity are transformed in that figure of Earth.earth as Mother and Bride of God.

The twentieth-century writer Philip Sherrard, a translator of the collection of patristic writings known as the Philokalia[‘the love of the beautiful’], related the figure of Mary to both the feminine-gendered divine Wisdom or Sophia of theLogos, flowing forth from Paradise, and to Earth.earth:She is Earth as a single immaterial feminine divinity, and she is earth as a manifold, material reality. She is herself the Body of the cosmic Christ, the created matrix in whom the divine Logos eternally takes flesh. She is the bridge that unites God to the world, the world to God, and it is she that bestows on the world its eternal and sacred value. She is the seal of its sacred identity. (Sherrard, 2004, 181)

In medieval cosmology that touches the postmodern but lightly skips across modernity, Mary becomes ‘real symbol’ of Earth.earth spanning Arden.Eden. In her figure the semiotics of life come charged with energy. Thus monasteries became known as the gardens of the Theotokos, and so in the manmade deserts of clear-cut Ethiopian highlands, Google Earth today discloses green groves around ancient churches that guarded and nurtured their trees (like the sacred trees of early Irish monasteries) as living memories of the savanna of Paradise. Such non-modern insights extend social justice to environmental justice, by a realization of ‘our’ supposed objects as indeed numinous gifts shared by us all.

Human song as life mingles with that of birds under the cosmic tree on earth. The logoi or harmonies and purposes of Creation, including ourselves, sing as birds in the branches of the tree of contemplation of the Logos/Harmony, as Maximus put it (Thunberg, 1997, 138–139). Yet the singing or semiosis of the earth calls into question the normality of the discourses of our simulacra worlds of self and society. It engages us with the other as we put on and shed disguises in layers of meaning amid our vanishing Ardens, still personalized in the intersections of time and eternity embodied in the living symbols of trees – medievally the ‘cross’ between the transcendentally semiotic and the immanently incarnational.

Amiens, a courtier-in-exile in As You Like It, thus appropriately put the ambivalent yet beguiling terms of our earthly sojourn into homely song in the twilight borderland of Arden, finished and countered by the self-styled fool Jacques. Very simply, under a cosmic-yet-real tree, the song touches first on the medieval forest of adventure and trans-species harmony, then suggests ascetic sustainability in the greenwood, hinting of post-human futures interweaving categories of human and non-human on earth:

Amiens

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’th’sun
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.Jacques:
If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease,
A stubborn will to please,
Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame:¹
Here shall he see
Gross fools as he,
An [if only] he will come to me.
(Shakespeare, 1992, 2.5.302–303)

 

Notes

¹ It has been suggested that ‘ducdame’ is a nonsense word, but also could mean ‘lead him to me’ (from Latin), ‘come to me’ (from Welsh), or a Gypsy term to attract customers, meaning ‘I foretell.’ It could also reference a woman (‘dame’) leading a man, which we here could interpret in terms of Mother Earth.

 

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21. Shakespeare, W. 1992. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. D. Bevington. New York: Harper Collins.
22. Sherrard, P. 2004. Human Image: World Image. The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey.
23. Thunberg, L. 1997. Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
24. Von Uexküll, J. 1982. The Theory of Meaning. Semiotica 42(1): 25–82.

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Alfred Kentigern Siewers is an Associate Professor of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at Bucknell University. The essay first appeared in PostMedieval 4.1.He also co-edits the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley.

 

What Makes a Pamphlet?

Joad Raymond

Though already venerable the word pamphlet prospered in the 1580s, as its meanings shifted and it entered into common use. In 1716 Myles Davies claimed it as ‘a true-born English Denison’, a native idiom, ‘of no longer a Date than that of the last Century, since ’tis almost certain its Pedigree can scarce be trac’d higher than the latter end of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign.’[i] Davies offered a range of meanings for the term, at the root of which was the small ‘stitch’d’ (not bound) book, tending to calumny or scandal. It was perhaps, he noted, etymologically related to Pan = all and I love: ‘signifying a thing belov’d by all: For a Pamphlet being of a small portable Bulk, and of no great Price, and of no great Difficulty, seems adapted for every one’s Understanding, for every one’s Reading, for every one’s Buying, and consequently becomes a fit Object and Subject of most People’s Choice, Capacity and Ability.’

The term first appeared in Anglo-Latin writing in the fourteenth century, and in English in the fifteenth. It derived from Pamphilus seu de Amore, a popular twelfth-century Latin amatory poem. Thence, with the diminutive ending –et, it became a familiar appellation for any small book. Following the spread of printing, the term began to specify a ‘separate’, a small item issued on its own, usually unbound, not substantial enough to constitute a volume by itself. In a minor usage the word described a collection of literary items, in poetry or prose, which were produced to be disposable rather than enduring. These were produced for the market of gentleman readers who sought entertainment or titillation. The printer’s prefatory epistle in George Gascoigne’s poetic anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1579), referred to ‘the publication of these pleasant Pamphlets.’ Here pamphlets refers not to the poems themselves (Gascoigne writes: ‘I may not compare Pamphlets unto Poems’), but metonymically describes separates collected into a volume.[ii] This usage continued into the next century: Robert Anton, in Vices Anotimie Scourged and Corrected in New Satirs (1617) complained of ‘obsceane and shallow Poetry’ produced by and for the university graduate who ‘murders the Presse with fellonious Pamphlets stolne from the imperfections of their dearest friends’.[iii]

During the 1580s the meaning of the word pamphlet coalesced with frequent use: it usually referred to a short, vernacular work, generally printed in quarto format, costing no more than a few pennies, of topical interest or engaged with social, political or ecclesiastical issues.[iv] By the 1590s it had found a range of uses: the noun ‘pamphleter’ (and later pamphleteer), the verb ‘to pamphlet’, ‘pamphletary’ meaning pertaining to pamphlets; attributive uses were subsequently coined, including ‘pamphlet Treaties’, ‘Pamphlet-Forms … Pamphlet-Subjects’, and ‘pamphlet war’.[v] These frequently carried pejorative overtones. Pamphlets were unreliable. A character in Henry Holland’s dialogue A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590) complains that ‘many fabulous pampheletes are published, which give little light and lesse proofe’.[vi]

Pamphlets were closely associated with slander or scurrility. This meaning has a discernible trajectory in the second half of the sixteenth century, and can be found in legal contexts. In 1559 Queen Elizabeth issued to the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastical court of the country, a set of recommendations and instructions regarding their duties. The fifty-first article of these Injunctions charged the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London with responsibility for supervising the press: ‘And bycause many pampheletes, playes and balletes, be often times printed, wherein regard wold be had, that nothinge therin should be either heretical, sedicious, or unsemely for Christian eares: Her majestie likewise commaundeth, that no manner of person, shall enterprise to print any such, except the same be to him lycensed’.[vii] John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, was interrogated by the queen’s ministers in 1570; he had written a book, defending the honour and legitimacy of Mary Queen of Scots, entitled A Defence of the Honour of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princesse (1569). Leslie justified himself, ‘that nothing was intended but a defence of her honour against so many blasphemous “treateis” and “pamflettis” as have been set abroad both in England and Scotland, which are printed at London …’[viii] In 1579 John Aylmer, who as Bishop of London bore responsibility for supervising the output of presses, wrote to secretary of state William Cecil, Lord Burghley: ‘I have founde out a presse of pryntynge with one [William] Carter, a very Lewd fellowe, who hath byne Dyvers tymes before in prison for printinge of Lewde pamphelettes.’[ix] In 1580, drafting an act to control ‘the licentious printing selling and uttering of unproffitable and hurtfull Inglishe bokes’, the lawyer William Lambarde spread his net wide to include ‘sundrie bookes, pamfletes, Poesies, ditties, songes, and other woorkes, and wrytinges, of many sortes and names serving … to let in a mayne Sea of wickednesse .. and to no small or sufferable wast[e] of the treasure of this Realme which is thearby consumed and spent in paper, being of it selfe a forrein and chargeable comoditie.’[x]

In 1583 a group of stationers complained to the Privy Council that the lack of codified rights to ownership of texts (or ‘copy’) was undermining their profitability. A commission appointed to investigate the privilege warned the Council that, unless some remedial action was taken, ‘onelie pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies shall be printed, and the great bokes of value and good for the Chirch and Realme shold not be done at all’.[xi] A 1588 royal proclamation, concerned with the import of catholic propaganda into England, requested that all officers should ‘inquire and search for all such bulls, transcripts, libels, books and pamphlets, and for all such persons whatsoever as shall bring in, publish, disperse, or utter any of the same.’[xii] By 1588 pamphlets were disreputable, potentially dangerous works that needed to be monitored.

An obsolete, early-sixteenth-century term, ‘pamphelet’, meant a prostitute. This may have coloured the name for a cheap book, available to any in return for a small payment. John Taylor drew the analogy bluntly in a comic poem:

For like a Whore by day-light or by candle,

’Tis even free for every knave to handle:

And as a new whore is belov’d and sought,

So is a new Booke in request and bought.

When whores wax old and stale, they’re out of date,

Old Pamphlets are most subject to such fate.

As whores have Panders to emblazen their worth,

So these have Stationers to set them forth.

And as an old whore may be painted new

With borrowed beauty, faire unto the view,

Whereby shee for a fine fresh whore may passe,

Yet is shee but the rotten whore shee was.

So Stationers, their old cast Bookes can grace,

And by new Titles paint a-fresh their face.

Whereby for currant they are past away,

As if they had come forth but yesterday.[xiii]

Even in its late-sixteenth century usage, the word pamphlet was deprecatory. Pamphlets were small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly-printed, addictive, a waste of time. As the form of the pamphlet emerged the name given to it was, like ‘Puritan’, an insult. In his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), Thomas Nashe dismissed the uninventive offerings of unashamedly commercial ‘Pamphleters, and Poets, that make a patrimonie of Inspeech’.[xiv] In Pierce Penilesse (1592) Nashe railed against Gabriel Harvey: ‘thou Pigmie Braggart, thou Pamphleter of nothing but Peans’.[xv] Harvey responded in Foure Letters (1592) with a complaint against ‘those, whose owne Pamflets are readier to condemne them, then my letters forwarde to accuse them.’[xvi] Other people write pamphlets. Thus Barnaby Rich in 1606: ‘What a number of Pamphlets haue wee by our new writers of this age, whereof the greatest part are nothing else but vanitie’.[xvii] As if to say: pamphlets insult the readers’ intelligence, but this, dear reader …[xviii] The lawyer Sir Edward Coke denounced in 1608 the unauthorised publication of an inaccurate paraphrase of one of his speeches: ‘little doe I esteeme an uncharitable and malitious practise in publishing of an erronious and ill spelled Pamphet [sic]’.[xix] In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a stereotypical pamphleteer was an idle exploiter of the credulous vulgar; by the mid seventeenth century he would cease to be merely frivolous, and become greedy and malicious.

The term pamphlet was not used pejoratively without exception, nor always to refer to someone else’s writing. Nashe refers to his Strange Newes (1592) as ‘my Pamphlet’, but only after describing Harvey ‘giving mony to have this his illiterat Pamphlet of Letters printed (whereas others have monie given them to suffer them selves to come in Print)’. Nashe is defiantly answering a fool after his own folly, and thus is prepared to denigrate the status of his own two-sheet quarto.[xx] Harvey dances a symmetrical caper in Foure Letters, when, after haranguing Nashe, he refers to his own work as ‘this impertinent Pamflet … this slender Pamflet’, before beseeching writers ‘not to trouble the Presse, but in case of urgent occasion, or important use’.[xxi] Nashe, conscious of his dependence on his readers, modestly admits: ‘I must not place a volume in the precincts of a pamphlet’, meaning to let it grow beyond its proper stature.[xxii] A similar feint of humility appears in John Taylor’s Nipping and Snipping of Abuses (1614), where he admits ‘I have at idle times some Pamphlets writ’, and refers to his quarto volume of poetry as ‘This little pamphlet’.[xxiii] Taylor, a waterman and popular writer, uses the term both negatively and neutrally as part of a deliberate attempt to represent himself as a modest, self-educated, and honest author. A 1591 news pamphlet regretted that ‘this Pamphlet’ had been held up by other ‘apish Pamphleters’.[xxiv]

In all these uses the term pamphlet hints at ambivalence; a commercial or pragmatic compromise has been made, a small bark floats on a sea of scurrility. In the hands of Elizabethan pamphleteers, ‘pamphlet’ is a complex term, but is essentially an insult.

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[i]           Davies, Athenæ, vol. 1, section 2: A Critical History of Pamphlets, p. 1.

[ii]           Flowres, sig.A2v, p.50; Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London, 1995), pp. 227-8, 302-3n.26; on the licensing history of this text and its censored sequel, see Clegg,  Press Censorship, pp.103-22.

[iii]          Robert Anton, Vices Anotimie Scourged and Corrected in New Satirs (1617), sig. B1r.

[iv]          Oxford English Dictionary: vide ‘pamphlet’, n., 2.

[v]           These examples, between 1571 and 1730, from the very useful entry in OED; some of the examples given below predate those in OED for the sense of ‘pamphlet’, n., 2.

[vi]          Henry Holland, A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590), sig. E3v. Theophilus refers to debates over the devil’s delusory empowerment of witches.

[vii]         Quoted in Edward Arber, ed., An Introductory Sketch to the Martin Marprelate Controversy, 1588-1590 (1879), pp. 49-50.

[viii]         Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland, 3 (1903), p. 160.

[ix]          Edward Arber, ed., Transcript, 2: 749-50.

[x]           Arber, Transcript, 2:751.

[xi]          Greg, Companion, p. 127.

[xii]         Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols. (New Haven & London, 1964-69), 3:13-17.

[xiii]         The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659, selected by David Norbrook, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (1982), p. 740.

[xiv]         [Greene], Menaphon (1589), sig. A3r.

[xv]          Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols., ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (1904-10), 1:196.

[xvi]         The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (1884-5), 1:155.

[xvii]        Barnaby Rich, Faultes, Fault And Nothing Else but Faultes (1606), reprinted ed. Melvin H. Wolf (Gainesville, FL, 1965), sig. 39v.

[xviii]       Cf. A. R. True and Wonderfull. A discourse (1614), sig.A3r; Thomas Bedwell, Kalendarium viatorum generale (1614), sig.A4v; Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615), sig. A4v.

[xix]         Quoted Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins, vol. 1: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge, 1982), p. 64; I am grateful to Peter Blayney for this reference.

[xx]          Works of Thomas Nashe, 1:258-9.

[xxi]         The Works of Gabriel Harvey, 1:220-21, 231.

[xxii]        Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane, (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 224.

[xxiii]       Taylor, The Nipping or Snipping of Abuses (1614), sigs. B3v, L4r.

[xxiv]        G. B., Newes out of France [?1591], sig. A4r-v.

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Joad Raymond is Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London.

Aphorisms Twelve

Abhi Choudhury

1.

Actually, every pronunciation has an objective. Some kind of outlandish and beautiful objective. As and when the speaker makes an utterance, every word brings forth a definite meaning to her, since her enunciation of the language has the immediacy and directness of her experience and consciousness. The listeners do not have the onus to maintain any such connection. So, in its finer form, it is impossible to have a real congruence between what the speaker intends and what the listener considers. We speak in a manner of our own and understand in our own sweet way too—but the two may not tally. Hence, before realizing the purport of ‘love’ it is merely a garbled sonic bundle; but after our comprehension it blossoms, rainbow-hued. God knows, every utterance has a strange and beautiful objective.

2.

And such is the situation when a woman says to her male companion: “I woke up to this nightmare: that when I wake up I won’t see you again ever. You have gone to your wife.” Some of us may align ourselves with this statement. Others are dumbfounded; they take a lot of time to take it in. Once in a Moscow-bound night train compartment, Mayakovsky assured a young woman travelling alone in the same coach: “I am not a human being but a fleeting cloud in trousers.” But as soon as he uttered these words, he was worried sick about whether the woman would somewhere end up using this deeply potent sonic pattern which was embedded at that point in his mind. We may not easily gather why Mayakovsky was agonizing. But those who know that often writers delve down, down, down and suck out our deepest thoughts, unbeknownst to us, and make them their own will, recognize the source of his fret.

3.

To speak ahista does not just imply speaking low.  The expression may also implore us not to go too fast in our speech delivery. Both meanings are inbuilt in the root, from Farsi ahista. It beckons humility and politeness. The seemingly equivalent word dhire does not have the same connotation: here, the etymology derives from dhi— a gesture to our self-controlling and rational faculties.

4.

After coming across in the day’s newspaper that chewing tobacco is surely carcinogenic, this fierce health freak of a boyfriend curtly advises his partner: ‘Discontinue’. What must be discontinued: tobacco or the newspaper? Can’t be both.

5.

The relationship has to work both ways and mutually, the lady wrote to the writer, especially if one is in a relationship of love. The writer concludes that the lady wishes to make the relationship work both ways, for that is what equitability demands. That is what is fair.  It is only months later that he realizes that what she meant was that the relationship was not working mutually and no relationship holds firm if not worked at from both ends.

 

6.

If I can clearly comprehend in someone’s receiving an award or a felicitation that he is an accomplished artist or a scholar, then there is nothing foggier in this world than the very word award.

7.

Words are sometimes the signs of the subject matter of thought, sometimes they are the signs of that very thought process. It so happens that we are lost for words. There is a constant tug of war going on between the intensity of our emotions, intangible sense of beauty, this utterly colourful world and our existential predicament. I want to tell you this every single time when I tear off the lines that I write to you. ‘When you were not there:’ the note seems just right. Not so with, ‘when you are here.’ We are stunned by these unexpected turns in our mind.

And then there are some in this world who are able to express colour and feelings—and create powerful patterns with words which would be impossible with silence. When our cosmos seemed to be engulfed by infinite full-stops and caesura or with relentless  tautologies and there was no hope all around, right at that point poet Shankha Ghosh pronounced—‘It may be illusory , but keep hope that something positive will turn up in favour of life; the world cannot sink and slip in this manner.’ And the world changed after such an utterance. Some in this world know the art of fusing the minimum-symbolic hidden in signs and the fleeting, momentary ripples in our existence.

8.

‘I may not turn up’ means I may turn up. ‘Only the heart knows what it seeks’ means that the heart hardly knows what it aspires to.  This is not unlike Prince William’s famous statement: ‘After spending a night in the alleyways of London have I realized how people spend nights in this city.’ This means that he is at a complete loss to figure out how people live on the streets of London.

9.

‘The songs of Tagore find a structure in the notations (swara-lipi)’: some revere the truth content in this statement and thereafter seek Tagore in the totality of form with extraordinary love, care and caution. Make it a mission of life. While others value the same statement but add that since the notations direct us to the structure and not to the songs themselves, one must work towards chiselling the notes with our imagination, experience and individual renderings.

10.

Mirpur: At the Bijoya Sarani Crossing , for the first time in my life someone handed me a bouquet of flowers and asked for money.

11.

‘Afridi, please marry me!’ Does she, the one in that Dhaka stadium with this placard, know what kind of person Afridi is? Will he take her to Pakistan after the marriage? What kind of husband will he turn out to be? But is marrying Afridi the point here? ‘There is no limit to our desires/Our excitement drive us like lunatics/ No happiness greater than illicit love/No diversion more enchanting than belittling the other man,’ says Jibananada Das.

12.

If acting betrays performance, it degrades the quality of its artistic success. But poetry has to resemble poetry; songs have to be like songs.

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Abhi Choudhury is a linguist and a poet.

Between Translation & Composition

Geeta Patel

 
Miraji was a consummate poet of the streets, someone whose life was made replete through the journeys he took. Mehr Farooqi’s many eloquent portrait in the newspaper Dawn brings him to life as a sadhu, mala in hand, long hair untamed, earrings dangling. One can almost imagine him, his thaila or shoulder bag laden with books and loose pages scribbled full of poems, a small bottle of alcohol tucked between them, wending his way on a yatra. He could have been a typical aashiq, a lover, hollow-eyed, locks askew, bechain, swinging between hope and despair, haunting the street, awaiting a glimpse of the woman he said he loved, Mira Sen, outside her firmly closed door, loitering outside Kinnaird College in Lahore. As he describes in his nazm, “Aankh Micholii”: “I walk past my house a little, wish she were here. How quickly she eludes my glance. What must I believe? Does she abhor me? But this: she looked down so soon, in such silence. What can I believe, does she know my longing? And this? When our eyes meet, she shuts her door, and I, destitute, wander again.”

But Miraji was a poet of the streets in many less conventional ways. If one can imagine galiyan as poetic paths, he also haunted the byways of libraries. He had forsaken a conventional education and was entirely self-taught. The librarian at the Punjab Public library remembered him as the first one in and the last one out. Libraries became his avenues to other worlds, avenues he travelled inexorably, returning to Urdu from sojourns into translations from French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and, closer to home, from Bengali, Sanskrit, and Braj. In absolutely essential ways these journeys transformed his being, became the lodestone for his poetry. Miraji was very young when he wrote many of his essays on poetry that he could have encountered only through such “travels”; some of them, collected in Mashriq-o-Maghrib ke Naghmain, were composed when he was 18 years old. So from the inception of his first forays into writing the lovely nazms, geets and ghazals for which he became famous, he translated. And these translations were seminal for him as a poet.

A few poets have acknowledged how important translation is for their own composition. Perhaps Rilke in his ninth elegy alluded to the centrality of translation. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, moved by the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and the profound lines of Hafez, sought out translation as inspiration for cycles of lyric. Kenneth Rexroth, in his essay “The Poet as Translator,” characterised translation as a kind of going beyond oneself in the act of voicing someone else’s lyric: “The translation of poetry into poetry is an act of sympathy — the identification of another person with oneself, the transference of his utterance to one’s own utterance … to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.” But Rexroth ventures further than this when, in discussing the British poet HD’s translations from ancient Greek, he calls her process and her verse “the story of her own possession by the ghost of Meleager”. For Rexroth the skimpiest understanding of translation is the common one: translation as a process of turning a text from one language into a text in another. Here the translator is almost absent, treated as a transparent funnel or conduit who enables what is most important — the new text. And usually what people look for when they think of translation in this way is fidelity, how close the translation is to the original. Rexroth brings the translator back into view, not just as someone who has to feel their way into the original by overcoming a self, but as someone who, in the process of translation, is taken over by the words that they are translating. They become something or someone else, and the two languages in their hands absorb these transformations. To explain the place of translation in Miraji’s life and work I would go even further. Adrienne Rich, in the United States, comes the closest to exemplifying what I want to say. Her poetic voice changed after she worked on Ghalib and she found in ghazal a form of lyric that made it more possible for her to enunciate love as loss. Miraji sought after different kinds of speaking when he translated; these then became his voice. But he also became another person through translation. And I am not sure how many poets have, like Miraji, held onto the spaces between translation and composition, composition and reading, reading and translation, as though they were as necessary as breath.

Urdu has of course had its own a long history of translation. One familiar and perhaps apocryphal story of the origins of the language makes translation between the various communities of the camp or the market its birthing site. And among many of the notables in the history of Urdu literature whose names may be invoked in relation to translation was Altaf Husain Hali. Hali, who made some of his living from translating books from English, could be thought of as someone whose call for a new aesthetics — through islaah or the improvement or revision of Urdu poetry to produce Urdu’s “nayii shairii” as poetry based in natural (that is, realist) description — was founded in translation. Nineteenth-century British realism transmuted into Urdu poetry might also have had the project of translation as its host.

“Nagarii nagarii phiraa musaafir ghar kaa raastaa bhuul gayaa, kyaa hai meraa kyaa hai teraa apnaa paraayaa bhuul gayaa.” This matlaa, the opening verse in a ghazal Miraji includes in Teen Rang (Three Colours), one of the poetry collections he compiled, scripted painstakingly in his own hand, fleshes out translation in myriad ways. It might be said to embody many of the features Miraji brings to translation. “From town to town the traveller journeyed, and forgot the road home, what was mine, what a stranger’s, both lost to memory,’’ he writes. “I don’t remember why I am here, what I have to do. My memory has turned into a flickering lamp.” A traveller, about whose travails Miraji also speaks in one of his longer, more elusively nuanced nazms, “Jaatrii,” is someone whose raison d’être is forgetting, in the ways that Rexroth intends. Travelling enables the sojourner to extend beyond their skin; travel as a method of translating pulls the poet away from home, the places where their voice assumes its familiar cadences and tones. This sort of translation inhabits the skin and sinews of another’s speaking and composition. So much so, that the differences between self and other, one voice and another lyric, dissolves, fades away. And the road home is lost to memory. What might this mean for a poet and writer like Miraji?

Miraji translated copiously throughout his life, while he was also writing essays and composing nazm, geet and ghazal. In his youth he translated the Bengali poet Vidyapati, Li Po, most of the symbolist poets, DH Lawrence, the Brontë sisters, Sappho, women poets writing in Japanese and Korean, and Heinrich Heine; he went on to translate Anna Akhmatova and Muriel Rukeyser, and towards the end of his life he compiled three books of translations, one each from Mirabai, Omar Khayyam, and Damodar Gupta. In my book, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, I investigate how translating Charles Baudelaire would invigorate Miraji’s desire to revitalise the Urdu lyrical tradition that had lost its way after 1857. I suggest that translation opens avenues for Miraji that do not follow the conventions of realism that Hali intimated as a new path for Urdu lyric.

These are some of the avenues Miraji traversed in “nagarii, nagarii”: that new ghazals might discover their lineages not in Perso-Arabic conventions but perhaps in the ordinary Hindi of the street, perhaps in the cadences and metaphors from Daccanii ghazal such as those attributed to Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah, who in “piyaa baaj pyaalaa piyaa na jaaye” sings in a language redolent with Braj. Miraji’s ghazal offers an alternative sojourn that diverges from the one suggested by Hali: one of possession, rather than realism. “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another,” Walter Benjamin reminds us in his essay, “The Task of the Translator.” Enchanted, seduced by another voice, the ghazal releases its own lingua franca under Miraji’s delicate pen: “ghar kaa raastaa bhuul gayaa”. In losing the way home the ghazal calls to mind the journeys mystics make, so necessary to Benjamin’s evocations on translation: to shed their everyday worldly skin, to forsake the differences between oneself and those who are strangers to us. This ghazal shows us what translation can do to a particular form, but also tells us what translators must do: forgo the comforts of the familiar. And wending their way along the pathways of mysticism, translators become one with someone else, porous to resonances. Overtaken by other spirits they come to be other than they were when they embarked on their travels.

What are the effects for Miraji? You see them, as I have indicated, in his poetry. You also see them in his prose analyses of his contemporaries who wrote in Urdu. You see them in his life. And each venue blends into the others.

Whether his name was taken from Mira Sen, the woman Miraji said he was in love with, or from Mirabai, the poet of mystical love, the change in his name is not the only way in which Miraji refashions himself into the feminine. In the essay, “How songs are composed,” Miraji says, “When the ripples of thought carry me, they take me so far away that I begin to think that only women can make songs.” Song comes truer as Miraji translates himself through a woman’s tongue. The poet is overtaken by a woman’s spirit, lives on in her skin, and his lyric is often spoken as a woman. In the familiar nazm, “Ras kii Anokii Lahren,” she asserts, “I want the world’s eyes to follow me/follow me as though/I were a tree’s supple branch”. In other nazms, under Mirabai’s spell, Miraji’s voice softens into hers, its sinews and refrains Hindi and Braj. The iconography of painting in sringara rasa and Mirabai’s lingering colours for her beloved Krishna, the indigo black of his skin, the pitch forest in which they meet, the rich darkness of their night of love, the bleak gloom of her desire thwarted release themselves into his own contemporary verse: the nazm. To take but one of many possible examples, this one from “Tahriik”: “Far off in the tall indigo jungle/black blue black clouds crowded/In the forest, a black koel calls/ black shadows on the ground/black wet eyes/black blue black hair./Close by./In the center of my heart. Slowly/slowly sighs arose/sorrow poisons the nectar/sorrow’s fierce fiery glances./ Sorrow’s yellow-black eyes./Sorrow’s soft whisper step.”

Translation also gifts Miraji a critical idiom through which he approaches the poetry of his contemporaries. Here his soulmate is not Mirabai, but the French symbolist Stephane Mallarme. Mallarme’s influences can certainly be seen in Miraji’s own style. Its elusive quality, its ibhaam, gathers its power from Mallarme’s evocative shadows: “The dark sits, leaps forward — like a shutter that snaps open and closes/with the hard slaps from a storm/like a wounded fluttering bird.” These lines from “Jaatrii” press themselves forward into a demand that translates their khayaalaat, their textured subtlety, into elucidation. Visceral and vivid, and at the same time charged with philosophical succulence, they marshal a host of questions that might expose or reveal the philosophical nuances captured in them: is the dark the dark night of the soul, the place where the poet has lost his tongue? Why does the dark open and close, come and go? These sorts of questions are kin to those that Miraji picks up from Roger Fry’s translations of Mallarme. In attempting to render Mallarme, Fry found himself adding exegeses on the verse which unravelled its elliptical intonations. Miraji expected nothing less from his own readers, and he used the same habits of analysis on the work of his contemporaries in Is Nazm Main (In This Poem). The collection is one of the finest series of close readings of Urdu lyric from the period in which Miraji lived. In it Miraji practices translations as acts of parsing. Unpacking the subtlety in each line, Miraji places the poet and poem into contexts that allow readers to enter the poem so that, for the space of the essay, they live the flesh and muscle of the poem’s language. Readers here become sojourners into another’s world, asked to forgo, for a small hiatus, the differences between them and the other.

“Adab zindagii kaa tarjumaah hai,” Miraji says in “Nayii Shairii kii Buniyaaden”: “Art is a translation of life”. And also, perhaps, what comes after.

“Prophecy from another time

After my life has come and gone,

after my death perhaps

In a spring season

When a call returned drifts in

My songs will be heard the

world over.”

The lines are Sappho’s, or are they Miraji’s, translating one of her verses as he inhabits her tongue for one of his early essays? The question is not an idle one. Perhaps the only way to answer it is to give the sojourner and translator, the poet who was Miraji, the last word:

“If anyone asks

Who said this,

Tell them what’s in your heart.

Miraji spoke and repented

And then,

Having talked

Forgot.”

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Geeta Patel is Associate Professor, Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures and Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry

The Speaker as a Listener

Prasanta Chakravarty

I remember a bearded, unkempt middle aged character, presumably not from the neighbourhood, who would be a permanent fixture at various seminars held within Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the mid-nineties. Sometimes he would hop seamlessly from, say, a seminar on “Bengali Literature in South Indian Languages” to “Recent Developments in Neutrino Physics” in the smooth course of a single day. He would primarily be there for free food. And during the summer—for the air-conditioning.  The organizers knew about this guest but would indulge him anyway. He created no fuss. Would find for himself a cosy corner in one of the back-rows. And would sometimes even mildly doze off between sessions. I was then pleasantly surprised to see him one evening perorating quite knowledgeably on the shifting fortunes of the Annales school of history to a bunch of research students in one corner of an odd canteen.

As I was participating in and witnessing a recent seminar in Delhi, I remembered the face of that dilettante scholar gypsy. There were really some star speakers here, some delightful talks, some powerful questions raised and responded to and yes, some great food and entertainment sessions too! The whole seminar was meticulously and energetically organized: everything went off like clockwork. But I was looking, quite sentimentally perhaps, for the unkempt guy. That is to say, people who would be there for every single session and in the interstices too. Just be there and even doze off if necessary. But be there. I am primarily thinking about the speakers. Many were present for their own paper only or for one day at most. They were present. But what about their presence?

In seminars, we go to hold forth. Mostly. To convince others of our views. In the marketplace of ideas, what have we been worrying about lately—that we try to convey and if possible convert by our powerful argumentative and rhetorical skills. That job once conducted, we tend to move on. So, one gets to hear often in human science circles: how come gender was covered, but not caste? Or some variation. Cover ideas! Very ambitious and taxonomic. But what about another kind of contract that we make with the organisers and our fellow spirits in the world of thought—a convivial contract of listening to other ideas? The very word seminar—from seminarium, semen (seed) would refer to a breeding ground, a nursery. Breeding cannot happen alone. We need to partake of that process.

There is a texture to each seminar, one which gives it a shape and character. To begin with, there is a vertical axis.  It pertains to the slowing down of ideas and the maturing of collective thought within the confines of the hall. As one listens to the first few speakers one gets the basics clear. This is, as a friends says, the 101 aspect of the larger subject at hand. The issues get gradually disentangled. Ideas begin to waft and float around—coagulating here and there in the hall. A semantic form of listening begins. Trends begin to emerge. By the middle of the day, those ideas, the initial ones, have made their way to the dining lounge. We bring our own thoughts, mix and match and wonder how individual unit ideas would travel during the rest of the day. Some happily recount personal tales about other such seminars, convictions and idiosyncrasies of the speakers and try to match their own perceptions and convictions with the currents and cross-currents of ideas. It is not that I am giving a directional shape to the texture of a seminar, but trying to think ,rather, about how ideas gradually build up. This building up takes a more concrete form as we traverse through time. We now get into listening proper, beyond the semantic. This is paradoxically a reduced form of listening. The partakers quickly realize that there is a shuttling between sound’s actual content, it source and its meaning. The language, the techniques of language, the arguments that we so habitually use, suddenly begins to reveal themselves—in unexpected turns and twists. We gradually see the subtle undertones, feel the ‘laughing off’ of a project or sense the circulation of trivial or harebrained ideas. Why was the word ‘reform’ used fleetingly in this way instead of that, we may wonder? Why does a left leaning intellectual frame her arguments around ‘status’ and ‘nation’—and not critique them either, we speculate?

What I am getting at is a certain entrenchment via retreat that leads to a kind of subjective relativism in convivial partakings. Every listener hears something different and the sounds, the twitching of the muscles around us and the sighs and smirks perceived: those that scaffold the ideas, get denser and subtler, ever growing. The nature of the claps after each talk tells a story, too. They shine. We take in the spirit. Submerge ourselves. As Anaximenes who, wondering about ‘air’ thought, “As our souls being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the whole cosmos in small meetings.” Perception, in small meetings at such breeding grounds, is never purely an individual phenomenon. It partakes in a particular act of sociology—that of shared perceptions. Reduced listening is a phenomenon. Only a sustained form of listening can take us to this objectivity born of inter-subjectivity. For this to happen, each pin drop must be listened to—with utmost care. This is the contract that each speaker implicitly, ideally, makes—with and in a seminar—which they agree to join in.

But there is also a material and lateral aspect of the kind of cross-pollination that might happen in a seminar. We go to seminars for selfish reasons—to serendipitously discover titles of books, lines of arguments that startle us and remain with us for years to come, meet new people and hear their deepest beliefs and benefit from them—pure and simple. That self-regarding purpose too gets defeated if we decide to fleetfoot in and out of the arena. Word is soundful and sound is meaningful. The meanings are useful to us. If we arrive just to ‘show up’ at seminars, we do not grow ourselves. We miss an opportunity to grab possibilities. Instead, we carry our hobby-horses from seminar to seminar: seminaring and not being in seminars. If we listen with care, it is possible to come out quite transformed. The act of sustained listening (occasional mental fatigue notwithstanding) is deeply important to have a feeling of, if I may be allowed to use that utterly practical phrase —‘take away.’ Here a discovery, there a confirmation of a speculation initiates and inaugurates new views of things. A mini-world appears before us whose existence had been always suspected but never experienced in such richness. Listening, and just being there, extends our vision in material terms. Someday we will use these thoughts in some different context.

And it is here that we go beyond the four walls of the seminar hall to the wider world. For ideas are nothing in themselves unless tested through practice or craft or events and are turned back into ideas again. The more we partake in listening within the narrow ambit of a single conference the more we are simultaneously and laterally savouring varied exchanges of thoughts that are continuously happening around the world—in space. By listening we actually work within a larger cooperative communion but in the process work for our own individual ends too. We are taking it to the outside world by a larger form of cross-pollination—that happens through the course of the seminar. The convivial spirit spills over. This can only happen by staying the course. By trying to assimilate more and more. Nor is the spilling over just happening synchronically in space. Perhaps we also talk to a future, yet unarrived time, by being attentive to the other partakers in a project. By relating the present subject at hand—with ideas that took shape and gave shape to the past, with our own time. We may both implode and explode time in seminars—it is possible. Ideas travel back and forth and may occasionally command a tiger’s leap into the past and then another jump to the future—as Benjamin saw the continuum of history. These miracles might happen only if we remain invested and intense listeners. And we may change our own futurity by thus consuming meals made of ideas.

The vertical depth of the convivial spirit and the lateral growing of the individual within such an ambit are two intertwining coordinates that fluctuate in the course of triggering and breeding a seminar. That is the lot of each discrete seminar. It is the level and manner of the fluctuation that may often determine the fabulous idea of what constitutes a successful seminar.

We could join the next one for our few minutes of glory, for empathetic support for a cause or a speaker. Or we could be there to listen, delight in and devour a feast of the mind, in which, even depleted of all resources and energies by its end, one could say, as with Babette, “An artist is never poor.”

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Prasanta Chakravarty teaches English at the University of Delhi.

The Film We Accompany

 

Raymond Bellour

 

From the beginning, there is the way that the first shot of a tree takes its time, all the time in the world. Two films open similarly on an apparently interminable shot of a tree: Otar Iosseliani’s And Then There Was Light (Et la lumière fut, 1989), where we follow an immense freshly-felled trunk pulled through the forest, and Manoel de Oliveira’s No, or the Vainglory of Command (1990), where the tree fills the screen before the camera almost regretfully tears itself away.

It has become necessary today for an image – if it is to remain an image – to consist or resist as image.

But the first shot of the tree in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) is not truly bound to such resistance. If for us the shot carries this resistance, it seems to come from beyond itself, beyond the inside of an order of which it is a part, an order proper to the organic power of a cinema that for convenience sake can be called ‘classical’, but that everything draws towards the harsh regime of ‘modern’ ruptures. This shot is a landmark: it will serve the film’s action, its story, and be taken up in its development; it will return several times, under varied forms, in scenes arranged in relation to each other. And yet this shot endures, is amplified, composed, as much inside itself as in relation to the following shot, with the result that an extreme tension is born, inducing emotion, an emotion rarely attained to this degree, depending primarily on the pure force of each instant and the distinctly singular disequilibrium it provokes, which will travel and accumulate from one end of the film to the other.

The tree that one sees, whose mass fills almost the entire frame, comprises an infinity of trees. Their trunks are arranged in an oblique gradation where the eye loses itself before returning to the leafy mass cut off short on the right but perfectly framed on the left, the sky demarcating in the top of the frame a great hole of white light, a vanishing point which follows the tree’s descending curve. A woman moves forward, appearing very slowly beneath the tree, on the right. She is Nita (Supriya Choudhury), the heroine, the ‘cloud-capped star’, in her white sari, as if drawn by the man’s song that has very quickly replaced, in this shot, the melody from the credits. Nita comes forward, passing along the bottom of the frame, gradually growing larger in the static image, as she almost reaches centre frame. One suddenly hears a train noise mixing with the song. It is then that the cut intervenes, the dynamic cut which defines Ghatak’s art. Nita is reframed in a very tight shot, her back turned wholly to the right, the mass of her black hair cutting off the lower part of the white sari and filling up the edge of the frame like the tree did in the previous shot. On the left, in the depth of field, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) is sitting on the ground, close to the river which fills the top of the image, bordered on the other bank by the oncoming train moving at a slight angle. Nita, watching her brother, turns halfway back towards us, by a strange sweep of the head, smiling, complicit, indulgent. She is fully in profile, then turns, returning to her first position, and exits on the left with a steady motion during which Shankar sings and the train continues to advance. After the train disappears, but is still heard, the third shot arrives: Shankar, now suddenly in close-up, seen diagonally from the back but from the opposite side, closing off the left edge of the frame, starts up his melody that he accompanies with arm movements directed towards the river. He sings like this for a while before stopping suddenly, now in profile, passing his hands over his face in a strange gesture, the scene ending as he stands up.

From the beginning everything here plays on the near and the far, the too near and the too far, and the passages and leaps from one to the other. There are leaps from wide shot to close up (from 1 to 2, 2 to 3), according to unexpected axes, unsuspected portions of space to cross. There are contrasts, by way of these leaps, between open spaces and spaces that are crammed (right to the extreme edges of the frame) by the mass of objects and bodies. Add to this the oblique angles of trees, river banks, the train (the oblique angles of the riverbank and train are exaggerated in shot 3) which seem to tilt under the tension between modes of space, empty and full. Add to this the song, its upward surges, its well-held range, its falls and sudden rises, and this train noise which cuts across the song, doubling it and harshening its rhythm. Add Shankar’s spasmodic gestures, as well as the slow variation of Nita’s movements. Then you have an image of the way in which, in three very simple shots, Ghatak establishes in his film a modulation fed by collisions and conflicts here still contained, inducing a formal disequilibrium at each instant, like an echo of the historical and personal disequilibrium which creates the pathetic basis of all his films: the partition of Bengal.

Ghatak, who died an alcoholic in 1976, was born in 1925 in Dacca, East Bengal (now Dhaka, Bangladesh), and partition made him a refugee. All of his films (eight features in twenty years) bear the mark of exile from which he formed (according to Charles Tesson, one of the first critics in France to ‘discover’ Ghatak) a ‘mise en scène programme’ founded on loss, shock and separation: in short, the unacceptable. Nita’s family lives on the outskirts of Calcutta in the 1950s, prey to a scission which will make each member of the family unit, with excessive aptness, the defeated actor of a lost anthropological unity.

There is the film we see. The film we retell, talk about. Then the film we critique, the film we analyse. These come afterwards. But there is also the film we accompany. A movement of speech, address, and perhaps exchange, whose reality is destined to disappear. The after-films are in suspense. The somewhat manic intensity and effort required for this work is always worth it, since it is a question of seeing precisely how the film works to the end. This is the basis of the teaching situation, of seminars, of so many lectures. This is the film that, despite the artifice of rewriting, I would like to refind. Just as it took place in a two hour seminar after a conference on emotion on the 8th of February 1992 at the Maison de l’image in Aix-en-Provence, each attendee having seen the film on the previous day, thus avoiding, as must be undertaken here, having to recount the plot.

The next scene is mundane. We will move on soon to some ‘strong’ scenes, but it is necessary at the outset to situate things in their narrative context, if only to grasp how, in the most banal scenes, those that serve to present the characters to us or to introduce conflicts with their local, social and historical dimension, everything is carried (sometimes lightly but effectively) by what I have called disequilibrium.

We pass, by way of a dissolve from Shankar standing up, to the village grocer. A magical force of passages when it is not only space and time changing, but bodies colliding. Resting on the counter of his shop amid planks striated by lines of light (two of them converging in an angle on his head), filmed at mid-shoulder, at a slight low-angle, his gaze fixed off-screen, the grocer challenges Nita. ‘Tell your father you owe us for two months. It is getting difficult.’ The demand forces Nita to turn and she comes forward, all of this in the reverse field. Everything in this shot is harmonised according to a very confident arrangement of diverse, unstable elements: the accentuated low-angle (one of the most consistent ways Ghatak has of situating his art from the outset beyond, or within, ‘normal’ vision); the two dark horizontal masses, above and below, sloping down, surrounding the two characters, Nita especially, positioned against the white mass of the rest of the décor and the sky which is isolated in the middle of the frame; the slant of a pole crossing this white area, connecting the black areas; the line of light, partial and parallel, from the shop roof, which goes from the grocer’s head to bounce off the right edge of the frame. Next the camera is very close to the ground to capture the mass of the lower part of Nita’s body which has entered the frame from the left (the shock and mystery of the cut as source of emotion: never, in a Ghatak film, can you tell on what part of the body the cut, the transition, will focus; here it is on the lower rather than the expected top half – but there is also a narrative explanation for this, which this initially groundless emotion prepares). In the distance, on the right, in the very open space of the shot (this is a totally realist cinema, vibrating with the everyday), a huge tapering shadow falls on the ground like a kind of threat bursting loose. It is at the moment when Nita, moving forward, seems buried in her own shadow, the points joining up in the middle of the dark mass, that the small event takes place: her sandal breaks and comes undone. Here we have another rhyme, following that of the tree, which runs right through the film, this time serving to situate the drama: poverty, of which Nita will bear the cost. Without insisting too much on the rhymes and reprises (analysis does this a lot), they are no less guarantors of the narrative (classical, but also modern), so they will inevitably be encountered. Next we see the lower body again, now bathed in the great slant of shadow, with just a little light on the left, next the hand which takes off the sandal, the camera rising up the length of the body, the bust and the head, her face pensive in the light. The camera moves with Nita who walks on down the street, now seen from behind, following the line of another mass of shadow on the right. Shankar arrives along the same slant at the grocer’s: playing with shaving soap he begs a favour and turns towards us, pretending to lather his face, a wild look in his eye. Towards us but never at us. Here we have one of the most acute forces in the film (we will see the excessive degree to which it is taken): always tending towards a look-into-the-camera which never quite takes place, playing (as here) at the limit of this contact in the game internal to the frame, or, especially, opening out to the limitlessness of the off-frame.

After the brother and sister, who are the soul of this story, and in relation to them, it remains (for the film) to present the four other members of the family, in the house which is the organic setting, from where all departures and returns take place. A heterogeneous space (at least for a foreign spectator); it is not easy to orient oneself in this series of rooms arranged around a central courtyard, a wide alley leading as far as the gate. Passing abruptly from one fragment of the set to another as required by events as well as affects, Ghatak finds the material to accentuate, through the greatest realism, the emotional insecurity which is the mark of his cinema.

The Father and Mother

They appear together in a shot (we have dissolved to this from the image of Shankar) to match the ‘madness’ which binds them. In this fallen petit-bourgeois family, now impoverished (due again to the partition of Bengal), the father (Bijon Bhattacharya) gives the impression of being a cultured man, nostalgic, old and young at the same time; the mother (Gita De) is a woman exhausted by misfortune, by domestic labour, and by a secret rivalry with Nita, the cherished child of the father, the eldest daughter whose salary (she teaches classes whilst continuing her studies) provides the minimum income indispensable to the whole family. This is the subject of the brusque exchange between the father and mother, in this shot which immediately shows them at each other’s throats. The father on the left, in profile, the dominant presence; the mother, on the right, in the background, on the edge of the frame (as so often in Ghatak’s shots, thereby preserving a vibrant off-frame where bodies always seem ready to disappear, all the better to return from somewhere else). The couple are corralled by the rectangle of light traced in the background of the image by the door that their bodies cover and uncover, following the movements of an erratic dialogue which brings them together physically little by little, in the central mass of the shot. Bodies in solidarity, alone and in despair. And the surprise comes from the father’s departure: instead of leaving by the door visible in the background as expected, it is towards us that he suddenly turns, his gaze held high (filmed from a slightly low-angle) in order to see Nita arriving at the front of the house. He moves towards her through a facing door, which nothing had led us to expect was there.

The Two Sisters

Without any transition we turn (from outside, where the father leaves with a group of students) to Gita (Gita Ghatak), the younger (and coquettish) sister. An image that is at once dense and profound and, above all, paradoxical. Against a background of thatched wall, the face is seen in a left-sided profile, a fragment of it visible in extreme close-up whereas the entire right side seems to look at us from inside a mirror in which the young woman brushes her hair as she sings. A way of once again playing with the look-into-the-camera while evading it, as permitted by the movements of combing and singing: they explain this false mobile gaze which appears, illusorily, to fix us. And this time the surprise effect in the space comes from the fact that the shot, which we assumed was situated, say, in the intimacy of a room, takes place in the yard of the house – we discover this when the shot changes (to a much wider shot), and Gita (with a skittish air) holds out a letter to Nita that she takes to her room to read.

The Letter, The ‘Cloud-Capped Star’, The Brother and Sister

This moment of letter-reading (Nita seen diagonally from behind, a tight shot, right side of the frame against a lattice window which comments on the prohibition destined to devour her) is the occasion for the first ‘expressive’ musical upsurge of this film in which music is the centre (or a centre), telling us as it does of Shankar’s artistic vocation, a film which, little by little, and in every way possible, becomes impregnated with music. By adding the second brother to his script, a change from the novella which served as his source, Ghatak found one more reason to transform, by taking it to the extreme, the tradition in which he inscribed himself: Indian melodrama – although almost all Indian films were then melodramas – where music is always so present.

Such moments, which fix and isolate the musical modulation, sometimes, as here, on a very joyful, ecstatic mode, more often in a hard, almost unbearable way, such moments touch on what the film holds most deeply within itself. In a sense, it is simply a question of a use of music (sometimes traversed by sounds which give it an edge and dramatise it) that seems to intervene, as happens in so many films, in order to underline the inner emotional state of a character, more or less reworking one of the score’s themes. But the most troubling thing, once again, is the way the event is cut up. In a shot without music or song (there are, if you pay attention, relatively few such shots, above all in shots, like here, almost completely without dialogue), we see the mother pass through the yard and the young brother operating the water pump. And suddenly, as soon as we reach Nita, the music swells, saturating the entire space, elaborating the dominant theme (let us call it the ‘cloud-capped star’ theme introduced during the credits) with a mixture of swarming sounds and shrills which will last, like this, for a little longer than a shot, becoming the measure of this moment. There is therefore in Ghatak a musical ‘expressionism’ (in its nature always difficult to qualify, but whose global feeling – here ecstatic joy – is each time very clear), added to the image expressionism, doubling, penetrating, intensifying it, all the more so as it seems autonomous, attached to its own line. This very direct way of creating permits him to express through sound what is happening in the image but which it cannot give us sufficiently, since the image is never purely ‘inner’ enough, finding itself by nature (in all realist cinema) always too close to the surface of things, bodies and faces, and therefore lacking, except through words, the ability to tell us what a character feels at the most inner point of himself, including his conscious experience of it. Thus the musical modulation, which, thanks to its seeming ‘arbitrariness’, becomes an over-motivation, suddenly permits the interior to be re-projected onto the exterior, onto the body of the image, allowing this body, which is (not only but above all) the character’s body, to become more present, more active, more pregnant, the space of an enduring instant.

But this is only possible in proportion to the intensity of the image itself. This intensity reaches an extreme point in this static shot which seems to vibrate; Nita carefully moving away, folding her letter, until she finds herself again in a very tight shot, almost directly from behind, right up against the lattice window. So that she can all the better turn towards us, the camera having regained this closeness, as if borne by the modulation, with an ineffably beautiful movement of the upper half of the body, which reveals her ecstatic face and lets the spectator believe that he is seen, looked at, by this woman’s eyes and smile. In the same way that, from the back, Nita seemed to look out the window to the external world, here, fixing us, she regards the off-frame in itself, the off-frame of the desire of which we, spectators, become the intercessors, the desire addressed to the still unknown amorous object of the letter.

And it is then that Ghatak cuts, as if to withdraw this too extreme gaze, and to permit him to return to the narrative he had suspended. But in the cut itself, and since it lasts into the very beginning of the next shot which frames her in a half-length portrait, the gaze persists a moment, miraculous for having been thereby preserved and as if intensified by this variation of the distance through which it comes to us, even though the body’s turning motion has finished and Nita now faces us. It is in this distance that the gaze subsides, at the same time as the music transforms itself. Nita lowers her eyes, reopens and reads the letter, the stacatto-like modulation gives way to a more harmonious and fluid tempo, closer to the narrative flow, evocative of a general emotion of the scene as much or more than the internal vibrations of the character.

(Let us be clear. It is not always easy to distinguish what I call the expressive modulation from other modes of musical intervention, rich and diverse as they are, passing without discontinuity from one regime to another by means of the least variations of action, bodily moods and movements, and also shot changes and distances, in short the entire work of figuration. Thus there are many intermediary moments and modes. But that does not prevent us from positing the following: there are especially clear oppositions which the music works with, precisely, as an image itself, a second image.

There is in The Cloud-Capped Star‘s music – or rather its soundtrack – a mixture of popular themes, ragas, reworked by the film’s composer Jyotirindra Moitra, that is at once subtle and stripped-bare. But it is clear that their strongest effects depend above all on the sound mix which is constructed as much with natural sounds as with those sounds created directly by Ghatak himself with the aid of objects or instruments – here is how Bhaskar Chandavarkar describes Ghatak’s drunken irruption in a recording studio in Poona, inventing reserves of ‘unusual’ sounds for a forthcoming film: ‘He breathed into an Indian flute to obtain a sharp sound like a shrill whistle, tapped on three different tablas with sticks, struck a Burmese gong, and so on, during one of his good moods’.)

In this shot, before Nita moves again, a single element breaks the equilibrium of lines: a framed photo stands at an angle blocking Nita’s body. This photo strikes her on the hip as she moves forward reading the letter, she seems to smile at her own action and whatever the photo awakens in her, then repositions it so that we can no longer see it, except some vague reflections of her body in the now barely askew glass of the frame. For the moment we will pass over this photo which prepares us for Shankar’s arrival, and will serve during the remainder of the film as a fixation-point for the excessive desire of sister for brother: these are the two children (or adolescents) that we have glimpsed in the photo, the brother and sister captured (as Nita will explain to her fiancé) in a kind of primal scene, an ideal time, ‘in the hills’. The film will later evoke the negative version of this scene in Nita’s mortal destiny.

In the following shot Nita, lying on her bed, her body inclined towards us, shot from a low-angle (here we see the ceiling clearly, as in a Welles shot), reads the letter. Then Shankar arrives in the background, opening the double doors (in which our gaze is swallowed up), pausing on the threshold, as if to indicate the extent to which every variation of an event is due to a variation of space, diverse distances implicated in the space of the frame. He rushes to his sister and snatches the letter from her. The shock reverberates through the following shot: this time the angle is high, after an elliptical cut in the movement and time of the action, and we see four arms above heads fighting over the letter, in a struggle resembling a lovers’ game, the camera suddenly very volatile, vibrating to the rhythm of this game which underlines a constant fluttering of shadows and lights. A very Cassavetian shot, before the camera becomes fixed in one of those positions Ghatak is fond of, in order to mark the circulation and blockage of energy between characters: Nita and Shankar are back to back, she hides her face in her hands, he reads the letter with his arms raised above his head. He reads out the love letter: ‘I didn’t appreciate your worth. I thought you were like the others. But now I see you in the clouds, perhaps a cloud-capped star veiled by circumstances, your aura dimmed.’ When Nita turns around and grabs back the letter, she returns to her original position, and Shankar is then, like her, turned at an angle towards us. A variation of the preceding moment, sustaining the tension of the dialogue in which the film’s theme is made clear. The brother replies to his sister who is indignant at seeing her personal life interfered with: ‘If you’re a “person” then I’ll be a genius one day.’

The end of the scene is significant in transforming this conflict of destiny into spatial terms, without it being possible to say that one ‘signifies’ or even ‘expresses’ the other. It can simply be said that a tension between open and closed space corresponds to a psychic tension, accentuated by the fact that we never know from what point in the depth of the frame a character who exits will reappear. A whole game is thus played on both sides of the frame with Shankar finally sitting, Nita disappearing from the frame and returning, alternately obstructing and uncovering with her body the deep space of the door through which she will finally leave.

The Mother, The Children

It is on a request for money (to Nita) that the scene with Shankar ends, and it is on the demands of Gita (who wants a sari) and of Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) (the younger brother, first seen just before the scene with the letter – he wants football boots) that this penultimate scene of character introductions opens. A scene in one shot, where the space is stratified according to the tensions of the dialogue. At the beginning, the mother is initially on the right, her frightened face turned half towards us, half towards Gita who faces us (in a crowded shot). After a camera movement which finds Mantu on her left, the two children address their mother (who crosses the frame towards the left, her body suddenly blocking our vision); they speak, and deliberate, as if talking to themselves as much as each other. An effect of social bondage and an effect of solitude traverse the scene, returning the spectator to his own isolated body.

The essential thing here is the mother’s movement within this very enclosed frame. Then a second camera movement opens up a rectangular hole of blinding white light on the left side of the frame. This is a movement without any autonomy, without a proper dynamic of its own, placed after a declaration by Mantu (this is a relatively rare phenomenon, as Ghatak’s camera movements are usually tied purely to body movements, according to a tactile expressionism). The mother is now in the foreground on the extreme left (as she was at the beginning on the right), united with the depth of field. And suddenly, Mantu and Gita, like us divining Nita bathed in light (she has just been payed), hurl themselves towards her in a kind of animal race, making their initial passage to the foreground a shock directed at the spectator as they move away, and their advance towards the background of the frame a physical dialogue between shadow and light. But, disequilibrium on disequilibrium, at the very moment where the scene might establish itself, allowing us to see what is happening, the mother’s head comes towards the centre of the frame again, in an extreme close-up highlighting her eyes full of anguish, eyes which could also be looking at us since their gaze is so completely internal.

There are thus constantly frightening close-ups (arising under diverse pretexts, but also almost without reason) of this extraordinary character of the mother, coming suddenly to situate herself at the most acute point of the image, underlining the torture which obliges the body (face, gaze) to maintain itself in the space which she fails to master.

The Fiancé

We are now at the beginning of a scene in which the final character of the drama appears. In a (pronounced) high angle shot Gita and Nita sit on a bench, Mantu standing in front of them: they speak about Sanat (Niranjan Ray), the father’s ex-student, whom Mantu thinks he sees. The following shot shows us Sanat, diagonally, very tight, who reacts to Mantu calling him (everything here creates a loss of spacial orientation, of a sense of distance); he turns and comes towards us on the right, his glasses crossed for an instant by two reflections, piercing the shadow. A miniscule but vivid initiation to the tension being set up before the following shot re-establishes the perturbed proportion of distances by showing us Sanat coming towards the group of brother and sisters.

(The Tree Again. Before moving on, to show how the rhyme insists, how it is worked through, by way of an extreme example, a second tree scene. Extreme because the scene will return seven times, in forms so diverse that they show at once the narrative insistence, the desire for symbolic centring, and an incredible capacity for invention of forms and a volatile dispersion of the image-material. The art of difference-in-repetition here reaches one of its highest expressions.

This example brings us closest to the opening scene. Nita and Shankar again: he sits singing under the same tree, as she arrives, again, out of the background of this tree made of many trees. But it is now decentred, and we initially perceive the branches of the tree under which Shankar sings. The encounter takes place in one shot, Nita moves forward and stops in front of her brother, left of screen. No train this time, only the song. So it is a quiet scene, presented in three shots: him, her, him again. But something troubling sets in, primarily at the level of the gaze: Shankar looks at his sister head on, whereas she clearly looks at him on her left (the right of the frame), at the very instant where we tend to believe she has arrived at least on the median line of the gaze [the trajectory of her movement towards Shankar? Recollection of the previous scene where, for us, she was so definitely on the right?]. And the trouble increases when, turning her eyes from the other side, Nita makes for the tree on her right in order to leave the frame: since we do not see her passing into the reverse field, we are immediately back to Shankar in a tighter shot, and cannot discern exactly the portion of space in which she appeared-disappeared. The mini-collisions of a variation, bearers of a modulation of the gaze-space).

The Outing

(We are now close to a third of the way through the film.)

For Nita’s birthday, the father and Shankar take her on an outing.

Two forces mark this scene, underlining the fragility of a moment of happiness. Firstly the oblique effects which occur throughout the general shots and landscape shots (roads, fields, etc.) are brought together from the outset, appearing to gush forth from what is at first a closed shot (the bus filling the frame, the father, daughter and brother alighting from it), thereby serving all the more to liberate space, extending it, dilating it. These are shots which, although oriented towards an action, ‘the outing’, decompose time, by the force of sparingly used hiatuses between frames and the disorientation which is produced, as well as by the disequilibrious perspectives accumulated within each frame. To the point where each shot, without being subjective, seems to respond to a particular gaze (Ghatak’s, or the three associated characters’).

Then, contrasting with these first shots and resembling their internal laceration, there is the series of shots associating the three characters standing still in the landscape, first together (in a crowded shot), then each one isolated (in close-up). Everything serves to highlight the impossibility of harmoniously inhabiting this tight space together. A bit like Eisenstein (one of Ghatak’s models), but the montage here remains narrative; without any symbolic aim, or nameable meaning, the expressivity flowing always into ‘impressivity’, into an intensity of impression. In the crowded shot of the three together, the back of each is turned to the others, so that we can hardly believe in the possibility of exchange between them, even as they speak. In the close-ups, they are framed, shown in such a way (Nita against the land, the two men against the sky) that we lose the sense of the global space, of a ‘natural’ relation between bodies which impose themselves each time through a sudden appearance, as if via a collision provoked by the apparition which precedes and follows it. Hence the motion of Nita’s head turning, twice, without us truly knowing from what anterior point of space this movement comes. There are enough shots and reprises of shots, as in classical scenes graded by a succession of shot/reverse-shot, for us to feel that we are in a definable space. Yet this space floats: thanks to the precariousness, to the tension internal to each shot, the space is submitted to a kind of force (in the sense in which we say: force of compulsion), a force which each time seems to render it autonomous. We never know where the point-of-view is held even though we sense its pressure. Each body is ceaselessly repositioned relative to the other bodies according to axes of the gaze which isolate as much as they bind. Axes containing no escape routes, bearers of an inexpressible energy: the kind that bodies possess when they are at once in solidarity and alone.

The pure work of découpage accomplishes here what the music so often helps bring about: making the affects circulate (even if here the unobtrusive music runs underneath the spoken word in conventional continuity).

Sanat becomes more of a presence at Nita’s house, despite the increasingly strange behaviour of her father and mother. The latter seems to want to push Gita towards Sanat, who shows himself susceptible to her charms. Like Nita, Sanat pursues his studies in a very precarious financial condition. Everything is against the possibility of their marrying in the near future.

(Tree – 3. Sanat and Nita sit by the riverbank, close to the trees that we sense without seeing them. Nine shots. Insistent oblique angles. Almost exclusively shot in close-up [animated on him, painful-ecstatic on her], except the first and last shots where we discover some branches of ‘Shankar’s tree’, and through which the train passes again. And especially, at the start, a gentle reprise of the musical emanation linked to the letter-reading).

One evening, the father, while drunk, falls on the railway tracks and badly injures himself. Nita feels obliged to abandon her studies and work in the city.

(Tree – 4. Shankar’s tree [could it be any other?] is now almost unrecognisable. In a very wide shot Shankar sings and sinks into a reverie; it is from the extreme edge of the image, on the right, that the friend whom Nita has just met in town will appear [return of Tree 1]. Shankar runs towards the person he believes is his sister: a brusque encounter, under branches that enclose the image, a low-angle shot, as if to highlight their mutual fear, then the friend’s smile, and lastly Shankar’s laughter, alone again.

A dissolve isolates Shankar now in a wider shot, the camera following him with a lateral movement as he walks singing, right to left, developing the theme modulated at the beginning of the segment, as in ‘Tree 1’ and ‘Tree 2’).

Sanat reproaches Nita for always sacrificing herself and offers to work in order to be able to marry her; Nita cannot abandon her family and wants to postpone the event. They argue about Shankar whom Sanat believes is exploiting Nita. But Nita blindly defends her brother. She believes in his vocation, despite the objections everyone makes to him, and they remain as close as ever, despite the tensions. Mantu decides to work in a factory, a downward step for this middle class family. One afternoon, when Nita leaves to teach, Gita charms Sanat and takes him out walking. She sings for him, presses him to take up a job and to choose a wife. Nita, returning, notices and avoids them.

(Tree – 5. The force of this scene is to repeat the first shot of the film, that of Nita walking, but this time compacted: Nita emerges from the mass of branches which saturate the frame, and the song we hear [off-screen at first] is Gita’s, sitting with Sanat close to Shankar’s tree. Everything occurs in a single shot, the camera moving with Nita, marking her pause, in order to see them, before setting off again, condensing [in its very variation] the first two shots of ‘Tree 1’ and the first shot of ‘Tree 2’. And the fragment which follows, between Sanat and Gita, substitutes for ‘Tree 3’ between Sanat and Nita, all the while incorporating the playful mistake of ‘Tree 4’ between Shankar and Nita’s friend).

Nita learns from Mantu that Sanat has found work. Disturbed, she visits him in his new apartment. We are now two thirds of the way through the film.

The Most Beautiful Shot

It is the shot where, leaving her fiance’s house (he is already practically living with her sister), Nita descends the stairs by which she earlier arrived. Everything serves to prepare this shot, from the moment of Nita’s arrival, finding Sanat transformed when he opens the door to her: now elegant, wearing fancy slippers and a white scarf, a cigarette in his mouth, and behind his glasses a weak and distracted gaze.

Everything begins with this descriptive movement, borne by the music which accelerates and rushes headlong towards her, this brutal advance towards Sanat’s face, this descent down the length of his body all the way to his feet. What is powerful here is the gap between the always slightly excessive slowness of Nita’s body, as well as her gaze, and the violence of this movement. One cannot attribute the camera’s trajectory to her actual physical gaze (all the more as the movement commences from a frame where you first see Nita’s head from the back in close-up, a frame which is therefore not directly subjective). And yet it is from her implied gaze that this trajectory is born, thus from a movement in her that is both external and internal and which finds itself thereby suddenly expressed, as it is also by the music, carried by an arbitrary vibrato close in its principle to the moment of modulation during the letter-reading, but this time much harder. The music, accompanying Nita’s walk in a conventional manner until then, stops whilst she knocks on the door; all the better to begin again in its naked violence, and endure, like this, until the two bodies advance into the room – we see only the lower bodies, the feet and calves stressing Nita’s floating sari, a choice which emphasises the effect of diluting the gaze, relating it to the mass of bodies in movement.

The look lost, to the point of horror: that is what this scene is about. In an astonishing manner, a dissolve separates Sanat’s and Nita’s entry into the room and the close-up where he tips a cigarette into an ashtray, near a vulgar object (a kind of little vase with a caricature of a naked female body), before the camera travels up again to his face to refind the frame (this time tighter) which revealed him at the open door. An ascent which therefore completes the previous descent, thereby putting Nita’s gaze back into play – a gaze already seemingly dismantled by the transitional dissolve – and passing the gaze to Sanat in order to give its effect to the following shot, which paradoxically he does not see. In this shot, seen by no one (except us), but heard by both characters, a hand (Gita’s) emerges from behind a mass of curtain accompanied by the rattling of a bracelet (modulated five times like a fragment of music). This occurs twice before the hand disappears; during one such moment the camera, returning to Sanat, slowly pans across to his face, now alerted, passing back again to the curtain, finishing up on Nita, sitting, seen in a half-length portrait (a little sculpted elephant on her right), her gaze lowered, now internal, seeing only the void invading her, but doubtless having heard this rattling twice. Thus everything happens here via this presence/elision of the gaze between the lovers which is spread over the ensemble of shots. A gaze that is of course assumed but then disqualified, and above all rendered opaque by the sound which makes it pass into the entirety of the frame and the body, specifically Nita’s body which rises and leaves without seeing anything, the inner eye fixed leftwards towards the edge of the image.

Then comes the most beautiful shot. Nita found again by the camera at the extreme right edge of the frame, outside on the stairs, in a very flattened shot, strongly marked by a powerful low-angle. Nita descends the stairs until she envelopes us in extreme close-up, the camera moving only the little it takes to allow her face to be framed in an intolerable, static image, in a moment of pure affection: the immobile face, the eyes always raised, one hand convulsively grasping the throat, the entire décor as if effaced, the sombre mass of wall becoming pure expressive ground and giving its violence to the circle of white light which is very quickly formed and purified at the left of the face, appearing to be (for we spectators) the blind vanishing point of a gaze which no longer sees anything.

From the shot’s opening, the modulation begins again, punctuating the descent, step by step, then installing itself on the stricken face: very punchy shrill notes, punctuated by lacerations, like a whipping sound hissing through the air and striking a body. This continues almost to the end of the shot, dissolving to give way – an intense instant of emotion, which depends on the encounter-sliding between what is beyond time and time regained – to a softer variation of the theme which guarantees the transition between the end of this shot and the beginning of the next. A transition which maintains its cruelty right through the passage to the shot of dark angular masses of roofs and shadows in the courtyard of the house, seeming to impose themselves like blotches on Nita’s face as, little by little, her eyes close.

But there are, of course, many ‘most beautiful shots’.

Mother starts raising Gita’s possible marriage. Father is violently against the idea. Mother responds that Nita is crucial to their survival. Gita announces to Nita that she will marry Sanat. The initial preparations begin. Nita goes along with the plans, offering her jewels.

Shankar announces to Nita that he has just found work in a music school. He is happy to leave the house where he has lived as a parasite, and asks her to resume her studies.

The Brother and Sister (Again)

There is an excessive moment in this scene of Shankar’s ‘departure’. Nita asks her brother to teach her a Tagore song, and they sing together, as they did as children. The camera isolates Nita in extreme close-up, her head leaning backwards, almost horizontally, in a painful ecstasy. Their song continues for a moment through a medium-close up of Shankar, when suddenly a noise of laceration (identical to that accompanying the shot on the stairs), followed by a musical vibration which serves as its amplification, comes to merge with their song. The surprising thing here is that, from the moment the noise appears, Shankar turns brusquely towards the off-screen as if he hears it, as if he had heard this noise with us, this modulation which comes twice more over a new close-up of Nita’s face (the image used on the film’s poster): from a slight low-angle, the eyes raised towards another off-screen area, her hair haloed with light, her head topped with two white marks which violently sparkle in the dark background of the shot (two of the lattice window’s multiple ‘apertures’, as we discover later). So Shankar hears, like the spectator, in the real world of the shot, where it would be audible (visible?) beyond the frame, the effect which is meant to translate the inner state of Nita that is materialised in the following shot, where she collapses in tears. An emotion is thus liberated, carried by this type of sound hallucination which is the counterpart of the ‘hallucinated’ close-ups which incarnate Nita’s exalted suffering (in a single blow two loves and two abandonments, those of the brother and the lover, are linked by the identical nature of their effects).

Nita, feverish, takes a day off. She learns that Mantu has suffered a serious accident at the factory. At his side, at the hospital, she falls ill. An X-ray is recommended. The father asks the doctor to verify Nita’s state of health.

Nita goes to see Gita and Sanat, whose work bores him. She finally plucks up the courage to ask Sanat for the money to pay for Mantu’s required blood transfusion. Sanat agrees. Gita kicks up a fuss.

Nita, coughing, discovers with horror that she is spitting blood. She moves to another part of the house without saying anything. Her mother criticises her behaviour, and reveals what she has heard about Shankar’s newfound celebrity.

Close to the tree, Sanat meets Nita on her way to work. He wants to turn over a new leaf and return to his studies. She avoides such talk by declaring that, for her, all is lost.

(Tree – 6. This is the torturous reprise of ‘Tree 3’. A long scene [17 shots, amongst the film’s most beautiful]. For the first time, Nita arrives from the left, shot in low-angle under fully framed trees; Sanat faces her. A dissolve divides up their dialogue, during which the train once again passes, very violently, as if between them, against them.

Under the train, with it, a reprise of the musical modulation that accompanied the letter. At the end, during the last shot, when Nita rises and Sanat looks at her so intensely as she moves away, we have the impression that he can hear with us, as previously Shankar could at the time of his departure, the shrills and whiplashes which again lend rhythm to Nita’s disappearance, as they did in the stair scene.)

Gita, seeking attention, feigns illness.

Nita at work, ill.

Mantu, now better, returns to the house – he will receive substantial compensation for his accident.

The father’s mental state continues to deteriorate.

Shankar returns, famous, having made his fortune in Bombay. He signs autographs and is welcomed as saviour of the family.

(Tree – 7. This takes place in two shots accompanied by ample camera movements, as Shankar sings and retraces, from right to left, the entire path he has walked [‘Tree 4’], that Nita featured in [‘Trees 1, 2, 5’] and that her friend reprised [‘Tree 4’]. But it is hard to recognise, or only via uncertain indications that exacerbate the disequilibrium, the cut-up fragments of space that are here finally united in one block).

The Handkerchief

There is a rhyme of rare violence in this scene, in which the entire narrative is summarised: the bloodstained handkerchief as Shankar arrives in his sister’s room, hoping to cheer her up as he had done with the letter. This rhyme is carried by an unique moment: leaving the arguing brother and sister, Shankar moves close to Nita sheltering on her bed, the camera following the handkerchief that falls to the ground right of frame. A musical fracas pierced by a singing voice rises up and underlines the shock of the passage from shot to shot that we do not see, so improbable is it and therefore accentuated-diverted, but that we feel as a commotion equal to that of Shankar’s fright: we are now at a very high angle above him, upright, his head on the top edge of the frame, his arms open above the bloodied handkerchief, the hands which fall trembling in an axis 180 degrees opposed to that of the previous shot.

Such shocks, in the last part of the film, condense and accumulate so powerfully that it becomes impossible even to evoke them all. As if the most violently affected elements, hitherto distributed through the course of the narrative in which they are woven (we have dwelt on too few examples) without disrupting a tight network of strong points, spinning themselves out and accentuating each other, now suddenly collide in a sort of crescendo, a choir-like effect touching at once all the family members finally gathered in a single, violently discontinuous flow, in order to prepare the final outcome, sealing Nita’s destiny.

These are firstly the close-ups of Nita, after the discovery of the handkerchief: the first especially where, lying on her back, the eye we see in profile seems to bulge; the last where she talks about rediscovering childhood, a life without responsibilities. Then there are, in the courtyard of the house where Shankar announces that Nita is in a state of advanced tuberculosis, that he will pay for her treatment and that he will return later that night, two shots especially, which bring the colour of eternity to the drama: the father rising up out of the shadows, his finger pointing, crying out: ‘I accuse!’; and Mantu, in close-up, against a background of white sky, his head inclined like one of Pasolini’s youths, or an image of Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, ever so slowly lowering his eyes in an unconscious gesture. There are, immediately after, during the stormy night which will for the first time allow the forces of nature to participate in the drama, the parents’ faces, their haggard and fixed eyes, traversed by water and light; Nita’s face in extreme close-up, first asleep, then as if roused by her father’s gaze (whose place she physically takes in the frame), smiling with a kind of radiant madness fanned by the lightning flashes, and finding beside her the ‘mad’ father who caresses her face, notifying her that he has packed her bag and calling on her, in a delirium of love and recognition, to leave the house. Then finally Nita, her eyes shining in the shadow, her meagre bundle under her arm, a white and now ghostly figure advancing into the night under the storm (there are overwhelming passages here from extreme close-up to long shot), running into Shankar who has returned for her, dropping the fetish-photo whose glass breaks on the ground (cloud-capped star, starlit glass); and Shankar announcing that he has reserved a place for her in a sanatorium on the hills of Shillong, the hills of their childhood.

The Hills

Then what happens is this. At the word ‘hills’, Nita, who looks off-screen with an absent air, turns towards her brother and with a brusque, animal movement (where the shot shifts and allows her to recapture the frame) walks towards us until she is in close-up, her eyes slightly raised to avoid looking directly into the camera, and sees the hills.

It is an absolutely powerful moment. The cinema here recognises itself in its ever-tested limit, so difficult to attain, between interior and exterior, realist image and mental image, perception and hallucination. Without forgetting what the image always owes to narrative. There are firstly static shots, trees, gulfs, roads, rocks, then, set off by a series of dissolves, long circular movements on other similar motifs of nature, suddenly rising up in their elementary forms against an open sky. These shots have at least three values. They are the internal images that Nita conjures up of her beloved landscape. They also sketch the implied trajectory of her voyage to the sanatorium. Finally they stand for the image of Shankar that we discover immediately after, in the penultimate sequence, visiting his sister. But, above all, these shots hold out to the spectator the combined energy of these three forces, in an undecidability between objectivity and subjectivity/ies that the entire film has never ceased constructing, in particular via the hyper-modulated effects of music and sound which the film at this point no longer needs, since this emotional violence has passed into the image itself: the leap that it then produces, and that the music can, with its simple and nostalgic power, simply accompany.

The Letter (Again)

What can you say about this ending, this final dialogue on the hills between brother and sister? Simply this. The effects of nearness and distance, of obliqueness and frontality, of rupture and inversion in the expected axes, and of body position (as much at the level of each body in the frame space as at the level of the relation between bodies): all this is a part of what cinema can produce most strongly and personally in the emotion tied to the appearance of figures. But it is sound, or rather the way in which sound strikes the image and penetrates it, which once again creates the most acute singularity of affective violence. When Shankar approaches Nita sitting on a rock re-reading Sanat’s letter, in the shot that has been for some seconds without music, a sonorous, musical vibration rises up, tracing the desire internal to this proximity of two bodies. It is no longer Nita alone whom the modulation delineates in order to express the variation of her internal states, as we have seen so often (and as so many other moments attest); neither is it that sonic torture which Shankar heard (as in his departure scene, where it marked their excessive intimacy as brother and sister as much as the way this intimacy took form, since their shared childhood, within music). It is a matter of something that is more simple and simply more: the vibration which arises from the rapprochement of two bodies in the same space, at the moment when the desire in the letter expresses Nita’s lost desire for the man she did not know how to love in opposition to her brother (and her entire family). Above all, the vibration translates her impotent desire to love herself (a ‘cloud-capped star’), as her brother, thanks to her, was able to do (the only other example of modulation à deux as strong as this is significantly situated, as we have seen, upon Nita and Sanat, during their last meeting by the tree).

It is this ravaged, dual, dissociated identity which bursts apart at the end of the sequence, beginning with Nita’s cry, with her words screamed first alone then in her brother’s arms: ‘I wanted to live! Tell me just once that I’ll live … I want to live’. These words, mixed with the affectionate nickname that Shankar intones (‘Cookie! Cookie!’) invade nature and remake, through shots more or less identical to those of the outward journey, Shankar’s entire return journey, punctuated by moments of this shot of impossible (and silent, the voices having becoming autonomous) embrace which persists, against all reason, between brother and sister, crossing hills and valleys, culminating in the endless moaning of Nita’s voice over the unfolding landscape.

The Sandal

This is an art of looping, of rhymes which accentuate the affects that they mark out without restricting their reach: pure affirmation. Shankar arrives at the grocer’s, as Nita did before at the beginning of the second sequence, which ended (as we perhaps recall) with Shankar’s arrival, faced with this same grocer who now asks him for news of his sister. But, above all, there is the sandal.

In the street, Shankar suddenly sees a young woman passing whom we recognise: it is Nita’s friend that she met in the city, when she took her decision to abandon her studies and work. A friend whose movements and bearing are very similar to Nita’s. She is also the girl Shankar mistook for his sister in the fourth tree sequence. At the moment when Shankar rushed towards her calling out (‘Cookie! Cookie!’), when the frame changed suddenly from a wide shot to a crowded shot and the bodies almost collided, Shankar recognised his mistake, which made Nita’s friend smile. There was even a brief moment of very intense sound-music (like bells) to punctuate the event.

She now passes in the street in this shot where Shankar watches her. Everything happens, as so often in Ghatak, so that the gaze becomes more and less than the gaze, so that it occurs via the body and the entire space. This means that the camera, leaving Shankar, follows the young woman, then frames the lower half of her body to isolate the motion which makes her stop to bring her hand down to her broken sandal (as Nita, leaving the grocer’s, previously did), here according to a (frontal) axis which has nothing to do with Shankar’s (lateral) gaze, while nonetheless remaining dependent on it. Wherein the extreme violence of the single exchange of looks which one feels more than one sees: Shankar’s head, in close up, from the back, the young woman in the depth of field who lifts her head, and Shankar who lowers his, since this vision is too close to that of his sister to be bearable. This does not stop the young woman, shown again in a tight shot, from fixing him with a stare before turning her head, smiling, and leaving, seen from behind (by the camera). For Shankar no longer sees anything, even if the alternation of the last four shots (her/him/her/him) carries the mark of the gaze beyond itself, according to the line of the event. Shankar is alone, twice against the sky, in a tighter and tighter close-up, eyes open as if turned inwards, towards the immaterial off-screen, before collapsing in tears and burying his eyes in his hands in order to see nothing more (this last time he is not looking at us, even though he is so close to us). A scene during which the music, until now dominated by a singing voice, becomes more and more present as the film goes on, doubled by a vibration which reaches a crescendo, the final modulation.

This modulation, as we have seen, and often said, is so diverse that one cannot reduce it. It marries, more or less, the line, the lines of the drama, detaches itself often, sometimes barely, from the myriad forms of instruments, voices and orchestration, making this film an almost uninterrupted score, where each movement of the image (and there are so many) relentlessly captures bodily life, finds itself at once innervated and summoned by its double of sound and melody. But being mainly centred, despite everything, on Nita, everything which touches her and moves her, passing especially through her from Sanat to Shankar (from whom it comes to her), before finally fixing on him after the visit to Nita who is marked for death, this modulation tends thus towards a centre: it is the vibration of too much love devoted to the impossible. Or this could also be called: incest, which is not perhaps the same in this other culture, but which here depends (as in our culture) on the promised and deferred jouissance that creates bodies in torment. Ghatak, assuming, through Shankar, in the light of this risk, his artistic vocation, thus tells us in the rawest fashion how to comprehend the energy and the essence of his cinema haunted by music. A cinema that he wished could be ‘popular’, even if he was only able, like all the greats, to give it the most aristocratic form and force possible.

This is doubtless what Serge Daney had in mind when he encouraged me to rework my analysis in this somewhat different form, describing The Cloud-Capped Star as ‘one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history’.

———————————————————————

I would like to thank Emmanuelle Ferrari and Nicole Brenez, who organised this seminar, and Aline Horrisberger, who taped it. Adriano Aprà, who lent me the video. And Charles Tesson, for his assistance.

This piece first appeared in another version, with a commentary on the absence of complementary images, in Traffic no. 4, Autumn 1992.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the City of Kaal-Ketu

  

Sumanta Mukhopadhyay

  

Delusion

clear field

afternoon hops and

the sisterly evening

 

lugs him, clutching hands

 

sitting by the bus window

 

why did i think all this

 

the world a quiet family

why did I think thus

 

News

when news arrives

it arrives like an emperor

 

killer king

couldn’t give two hoots about us

 

tail up, towards the cowshed we scamper

scurry like our forefathers

 

and keep on running

 

when events happen

we do not care about news.

 

Lock

cold, brass lock

i touch and it speaks

at night

 

each shard of this broken life

soaked in wretched sadness

 

an absent fairytale

 

if you hold on to it a bit more bodily

like an old man, it inquires

 

“has everyone come back?”

it seeks

 

do I really know

how much of the door is outside

and how much inside

 

Gita

sprinkling  a bit of a mirth

i see

the scene is quite drenched

by the evening redness

in fields, in the grass

the way a restless worm moves

to another such grass

so darts troop of souls

from blade to blade

in vedic discipline

but as they rush

like atheists broken from their spell

they speak up

about that torn shirt

they inquire

why hurry

if the kids fall behind

what then?

 

Bag

running, suppose

one trips at the moving bus

what then?

 

and if one forgot, suddenly

to run

as the train approached

 

when he beckons he does

when he does not

he hits you straight at the chest

 

the canvas bag remains

and the mother’s

talking, bony polestar

 

this bag

know this bag is your

bread and butter

 

Coma

blind in rage

you are senseless, about two hours now

is this called coma?

do i then step out this midnight

or tomorrow, early morning perhaps

bed, flowers, frankincense, robe

getting hold

 

i’d reach straight to the hospital

 

thinking all this

i woke up

 

darkly room

 

Poison Tree

who are these around

tigers, wolves may be

milk white dhoti-kurta

 

roots of poison

 

on leaves, flowers, buds, branches

milk flows.

 

Touch

at a great height

the wail

that mutes one

 

i write the sound of its

saline contour

in Braille.

 

Fever

the skeleton’s forehead

i feel

it’s running fever, 100 celsius

 

no fan

no cash

no light

no words

 

a suffocating room.

———————————————

Sumanta Mukhopadhyay works at the Barasat Government College. This is a short selection  from his recently published book of poems Kaal-Ketur Shohore.

Letter from Advaita Malla Barman

                                                                                                                                                                          

 Gokanghat, Tipprah

 23.6. 34

 

 

 

 

Dear Brother,

I have read your poem a few times, from beginning to the end. I would like to give my comments here. Hope you will not be annoyed. Wherever I found something wanting, or irrelevant in style or meaning, I have marked with a red pen. I have left the responsibility to correct those to you.

About publishing poetry, I can say this much that the poem is not bad at all; in fact quite surprisingly fresh coming from a young poet. Its but still not fully there, not fully fit for publishing, if I may say. So, do not try to publish it right away. Do not get disheartened. Keep on writing. You will make a name in a short while—I harbor such faith and hope.

Here, probably a couple of words about poetry will not be entirely irrelevant.

1.Giti-kavya (Lyrical Poems). 2. Khanda-kavya (Narrative Poems). 3. Maha-kavya (Epic) all vary in style and approach. Your heart and mind needs to be prepared differently for each.

First, you have to work hard as an apprentice on Giti-kavya. Snapshots, a pictorial bent is the soul of Giti-kavya. Try to paint such pictures on the page. Only then get into Khanda-kavya. You may write Khanda-kavya with past or present happenings, but perhaps past is a better repertoire to start with. It will be easier. This is because you can run your imagination ceaselessly and with abandon over the past. You will understand the difficulties with the present—for instance, a blurring and continuity of events that are yet to unfold often is a problem. Future gets in. And we are not prophets.

But do not try your hand on epic. That is a most difficult task. It takes a lifetime to assimilate– first style and then proportion. And needs a fund of knowledge too. Hindu-shastra says that there needs to be at least 9 Swargas in an Epic. You cannot use more than one rhyme scheme. And so on. For Narrative poetry you can collect ‘material’ from Hindu or Muslim mythology or history. There should be an overall symmetry—this you should be truly careful about. Expression and language should be impeccably used. You have that kind of thoroughness and eye—and you will surely be successful.

Nature itself and all around you is a grand granary. For the pictorial, I mean. Try shorter lyrics with minor things and make them connected to the world. Let readers know that nothing is minor. The more you culture these things the more you will become ecstatic with joy and love.

Never follow anyone. Keep your own style, personality and freedom intact, distinct. I am sure you know the difference between imitating and following. You may try a bit of Madhusudan’s blank verse. This is possible until you inculcate your own style. But do not hobnob with Tagore’s transcendentalism or romanticism—those cannot be easily worked out.

I shall conclude my letter with one more thing. Do not get yourself into print without sadhana. And whatever sadhana you do carry on—keep that secret and no need to make any  hue and cry. No fire can be extinguished. Do not hasten. The reading public will come to know about your talent sooner or later. I can say that with some conviction. If you have an iota of faith and love in me, do keep on writing, ceaselessly.

I have tried to relate to you all that I thought of your poetry, as a true friend. Openly. Frankly. If all these annoy you to the least, please forgive me with your ample kindness.

Sincerely,

Yours

Advaita Malla Barman

————————————————

Advaita Malla Barman is one of the most significant writers from Bengal writing in the first half of the twentieth century. He died young.This letter was written when he was all of 20 years.

No Detergent Can Undo

 

 

Sreyashi Goswami

 

 

 

 

 

Books:  Lover forever, makes strong friends, permanent enemies.

Flower: Softness or is it  hallucination.

Brotherhood: Feeling towards a brother that needs to be chiseled for a man particularly.

Responsibility: Easy and difficult to know when to jettison it.

Night: 12 hours of silent howling.

Wind:  Unkempt thoughts in mind, suddenly.

Lie:  Moment’s Yes, Moment’s No.

Uncivility:  As if its our democratic right to be rude.

Ink–Fountain Pen: Green, Red, Blue–clarity.

Day: Each day, witness to a memorable event.

TV:  All spectators or are there some attentive readers too?

Year:  Relations and wonder anew.

Liking:  Shifting of the unliked.

Hearing:  Unsaid, once in a while uttered.

Dead Man:  Burning pyre or a puppet in an airconditioned room?

Personality:  The protocols of knowing each one distinctively.

Dignity:  A pot made of a different metal.

Birth:  To let oneself be part of a new beginning.

Love: A strange giving, a time of giving.

Traffic Jam: Lines of jet planes on the road, as if all will qualify for future exams.

Gotra: Never begins  fresh like morning dew.

Indifference: Cruel, barbed manner of speaking.

Time: Sharp, breaking brook– now slowing, hastening now…

Spot:  No detergent can undo.

—————————————-

Sreyashi Goswami is a poet and a traveller.

Form, Sensation, Emotion

[HUG interviews Santanu Das in the wake of his talk on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in Delhi University on February 9, 2012]

HUG: If I may take your reflections on Lawrence this week in DU as a platform to probe a little more on the current state of affairs in European Modernism scholarship (although Lawrence may not fit in with Modernism wholly), the first thing that comes to my mind is about the very idea of poetry itself. When you say that you look for pleasure in poetry, what exactly do you mean?

Santanu: By ‘pleasure in poetry’, I meant at a fundamental level enjoyment of poetry i.e. the formal pleasure afforded by verse, or pleasure afforded by poetic form. Since poetry, more than the novel or the short story, is dependent on patterns of sound (rhythm, meter, rhyme etc), the sensuous pleasure at the immediate, bodily level is often intense. Increasingly, we are addressing and trying to theorise not just the technical aspects of verse – what often goes under the name of prosody – but the role of the human sensorium in the enjoyment of verse. Note that the New Critics were  keenly aware of this, though they perhaps did not theorise it: an excellent example of this is The Music of What Happens by Helen Vendler who remains one of the most important and pleasurable critical voices. A more theoretical approach is developed recently by Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. The ‘pleasure’ in poetry, with its proximity to the body, can be articulated through various theoretical models: the two that immediately come to my mind are ‘jouissance’ (Barthes) and ‘semiotic’ (Kristeva). However I think that such ‘theory’, if applied, has to be nuanced, and if possible woven into the texture of the writing: see Maud Ellmann’s The Poetics of Impersonality on modernist poetics which to me is one of the most brilliant examples of that combination of close reading, theoretical astuteness and just pleasurable, playful writing. A more recent work, very different but still acutely pleasurable, is Angela Leighton’s On Form,  which may be considered as part of the swell of interest in what is now being called ‘new aestheticism’.

HUG: There is a lovely, understated manner, in which you were trying to read Lawrence neither as a realist nor as a mystic. That brings us to a speculative domain that can be touched and felt at the same time. Is it just about Lawrence’s poetry or would you say that poetry and literature in general is about that kind of speculative materiality?

Santanu: I’m sorry but I don’t think I wholly understand the question; and being old-fashioned (!), I’m slightly reluctant to make statements about poetry or literature in general. You’re absolutely right when you say that Lawrence is neither a realist nor a mystic: as I was trying to say, there is a wonderful play in his poetry between a perceptual delicacy and a performative excess. In fact Lawrence’s poetry, like much of Lawrence himself, flatly refuses to fit into any kind of theoretical model; that’s one of the main reasons I find him so fascinating.

HUG: This brings me to this thing about this reaction against post-structuralist abstraction, historicism and discourse analysis too. You say a great deal about emotions, make sharp points about form but you also fundamentally think kinaesthetically. How is subjectivity related to matter?

Santanu: I think I suggested that it is Lawrence who often thinks in terms of motion and energy, as if kinaesthesia is central to the birth of the poetic object in his consciousness (critics have often noted the influences of Heraclitus and Nietzsche,  but I think this is not solely the reason). And yes, I’m very interested in emotions. Most of my work has circled, in one way or the other, around human emotions, often in times of crisis. As I said, what Lawrence wants to touch after all is not just the body – as often with Keats and Owen – but human feeling: ‘Tenderness’ was his initial title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When you say about ‘subjectivity (being) related to matter’, yes, I think you were responding to the phenomenological underpinnings of the paper, that our consciousness is not just a subjective shiver but usually consciousness of the world – I was partly reacting against the excesses of some stands within post-structuralism on one hand and the over-density of some new historicist works. I was trying to highlight the acuity of Lawrence’s phenomenological thinking, while paying close attention to literary form and historical context, as when I discuss the startling passage from Lawrence’s ‘Insouicance’.

HUG: On a related point: phenomenological everydayness may have a rough, often an antagonistic relationship to history. But some people that you cite in order to buttress the point on Lawrence’s sense of the tactile—say, Sartre or Merleau Ponty or Lefort, are deep historicists too?

Santanu: Yes, there is often an assumed antagonism between the two but the challenge is to historicise the everyday. Think of a novel about the everyday or a day, such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or Joyce’s Ulysses, and how absolutely enmeshed the ‘day’ is in the history, whether that of post-war London or semi-colonial Dublin. One of my main aims in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature was to unravel the everyday in the trenches through the sensuous, and show how historical factors impact on the contingent.  As you know, at the moment there is a big interest within modernism in the everyday, and the phenomenological is increasingly brought in dialogue with the historical – think of a work like Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics. I think that Michael Levenson is also very interested in the phenomenological and the perceptual, and how the historical contexts of modernity bring about a shift in perception, or create ‘the shock of the new’.

HUG: What is your sense of transgression in poetry? If we do not look for progressive or programmatic ideas of transgression in the poetry of Lawrence or Keats or Hopkins or Owen, what in their poetry might disturb the banality of ordering?

Santanu: I’m not wholly sure about what you mean by ‘banality of ordering’ but I’ve a sense that you mean conventional/canonical/standardised ideas – am I right? Of course there has been wonderful work on the relationship between poetry and politics, or works that have revealed the political, the dissident and the dissonant aspects of verse.  Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Isobel Armstrong’s work on Victorian Poetry (I forget the title – Poetry, Politics?)  spring to mind. But I wonder whether one could/should always look for progressive or programmatic ideas of transgression in poetry (not that you’re suggesting that). While reading against the grain can be thrilling, I’m also slightly wary of readings of poetry that have palpable designs or agendas which are not nuanced to the historical and formal particularities of the poem. Moreover is transgression (so influential and important as a concept in the 1990s and even early 2000) always, necessarily, or inevitably progressive (I find some of the current ‘death drive’/necessarily transgressive assumptions  within queer theory politically problematic, especially when related to actual/medical/lived experiences)?  As to the disturbing qualities of verse by some (not all) poets, I guess you’re gesturing towards Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic? – you’re absolutely right, Owen is a wonderful example – thanks.

HUG: Is there any scope of the theological or the ethical in modernism? There is grappling with death, darkness and God in Lawrence, of course. How does kinaesthesia relate to such questions of non-being?

Santanu: There is a big resurgence of interest in the theological within modernism: Suzanne Hobson’s book on the relation between theology and modernism has just come out from Palgrave (I forget the exact title but I think it has got ‘angels’ in it). Lawrence’s intense engagement with death, darkness and God is informed by but cannot possibly be confined within a neat theological framework. As Lawrence said toward the end of his life, ‘God is after all a great imaginative experience’.  I don’t know how kinaesthesia is related to ideas of non-being but it’s a tantalising line of investigation – have you got any suggestions?

HUG: In wonderful moment of disclosures, you brought Lawrence to life: his concern for his wife, his impotency, his tortured relationship to death and so forth. But that he was bossy and uneven in temperament is also something that you highlight. Of course, his poetry can be detached from his biography—as modernism would want us to do. But, as I said, you stressed Lawrence’s preoccupations—things and ideas he loved and hated, along with a close reading of his poetry. Poetry and the man worked with each other. Does it make a difference to poetry if the man is self centred or bossy or some such? Does that alter the poet’s relationship with his readers?

Santanu: I’m tempted to revert to Wilde (if I remember correctly): there is nothing as moral or immoral, there is good and bad literature. Of course biographical details are important to illuminate the literature, and prejudices such as racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny can seriously compromise the work (as occasionally with Lawrence) but part of the critic’s (and the reader’s) fascination is to untangle such knots and investigate the complexities.

Many thanks for engaging with my paper with such rigour and insight – I’m really grateful.

 ——————————————————————————————

Santanu Das teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (CUP, 2005) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (CUP, 2011).