The Lisbon Story of Contingent Identity: Part II

The many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa were essentially different poets. His case was neither the commonplace and destructive psychological affliction of multiple personality disorder nor the joyful game of role-playing of our childhood that to our wonder (and regret) we rediscover at a later age, often rather at too late an age when we have cleansed ourselves of the possibilities of renewal such a game brings, the antiseptic harmlessness of our immediate reality by then being the sole purveyor of our lonely needs. For Pessoa, the unique corporeal presence was the accident -- many different streams of consciousness finding a home within the same self-sustaining genetic machine. Given the creative abandon with which all these different Fernando Pessoas expressed themselves (rarely) to each other and (mostly) to the world outside, one must conclude that it was a fortunate accident.

Among all the different heteronyms -- and there were many starting from the early childhood of Pessoa -- the most prominent three poets are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos. They were all born at around the same time -- 1889, 1887 and 1890 -- and Reis and Campos always considered them the disciples of Caeiro; the guru died an early death in 1915. Reis focused on the introspective and philosophical aspects of Caeiro's art though Caeiro himself denies Philosophy any virtue ("Mystic poets are sick philosophers,/ And philosophers are lunatics"), his poems betraying a classical erudition and inclination; Campos wrote Whitman-esque 'sensationist' poems: 'Maritime Ode' and 'Salutations to Walt Whitman' are great examples.

Fernando Pessoa, who was indeed a prominent literary figure in contemporary Lisbon, once described, in one of his rare self-revealing moments, that his entire artistic enterprise is a "drama divided into people instead of acts". But there is no reason we need to attribute to this confession a greater truth than we are willing to grant to the very real poets like Reis and Campos that this confession tries to classify together. After all, wasn't also there a poet called Fernando Pessoa who, once published, had his existence questioned openly by Reis and Campos on the pages of the same newspaper that published poems by this so-called Fernando Pesoa? Maybe this (suspiciously frank) self-revelation coming from that poet Fernando Pessoa was also an act of revenge against those who took part in the literary conspiracy of denying Pessoa the poet his unique, separate, real identity!

Caeiro's poems would resonate deeply with any consciousness that has tried to grapple with the question of what value, if any at all, Metaphysics or Science may have on our pure ontological mode of existence, the 'being-in-itself' as Heidegger would write about a few years later. Many Caeiro poems also display a startling resemblance to Zen Koans in their rejection of formulated wisdom, their rejection of dualities and identification, their rejection of rejection itself. Caeiro writes: "I've only taken on this odious role, an interpreter of Nature,/ Because there are men who don't grasp its language,/Which is no language at all." But this resemblance shouldn't be taken too literally for Caeiro is not meditating, he is humbly claiming for himself a sainthood built on an unencumbered form of being: "And if God should ask: "And what did you see in things?"/ I'll answer: "Just the things themselves. That's all you put there."/And God, who after all is savvy, will make me into a new kind of Saint." But if we meditate on the serene grace of Caeiro's verse, we realize that his equanimity, his stoic acceptance of existence is not as self-complete and self-sustaining as it appears to be. As Campos writes: "What's the writing of poetry but a confession that life isn't enough?" Caeiro yields to the desire of sharing his insight (the insight which he claims not to possess because there is none) about Nature, about his absolute ease with the Nature. His contentment is virile, it wants to possess; the poems are fueled by that desire.

This fundamental self-contradiction at the heart of Caeiro's work is branched into two different streams that mirror each other: the self-questioning struggle for nothingness that marks Reis and the pendulum swing between joy and despair for a search into the unknown through senses (and transcending the senses) that illuminates Campos. Where Reis says:
"May the Gods grant me, stripped of all/ Affections, the cold freedom of the heights of nothingness", Alvaro de Campos writes: "Nothing holds me./I want fifty things at the same time./I long with meat-craving anxiety/For I don't know what--/Definitely something indefinite.../I sleep fitfully and live in the fitful dream-state/Of a fitful sleeper, half dreaming."

Apart from these three heteronyms, there were many others including Fernando Pessoa the poet. There was also 'The Book of Disquiet' -- a hesitant journal of impressions and questions and doubts and moments of discovery and regrets and metaphysical ruminations; meditations on mood, external reality, literary works -- a diary ostensibly maintained by Bernardo Soares, a lonely bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, with whom Fernando Pessoa the famous literary figure established an unusual friendship. The journal paints a haunting, mysterious but sombre picture of Lisbon that somewhat resembles the few poems about Lisbon that Campos had written. 'The Book of Disquiet' , by its very subversive (and defiant to all classifications) nature can illuminate the genesis of all those poets residing in the house that was Fernando Pessoa. To be continued in Part III...
(All translations from Portuguese are taken from different collections of translations by Richard Zenith)

The Lisbon Story Of Contingent Identity: Part I

According to many critics, Jose Saramago is arguably the most inventive and original novelist writing today. I myself lack the mandatory faith in my own critical abilities to announce with such authority the supreme hierarchy of novelistic greatness, especially in a time that is also blessed with the truly wonderful works of Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis. One also understands that the judgments on the singular greatness of Saramago is made based on a chronological compartmentalization where the generation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Mario Vargas Llosa or Carlos Fuentes precedes the current generation. Without getting lost in the details of the controversy that such an yardstick for aesthetic comparisons might incite, one would also like to point out that as far as chronology of a writer's life is concerned Saramago belongs more to the generation of Marquez and Grass. Like them, he was born in the 1920s. But unlike them, he has been writing his best works in the last twenty five or so years. And going by his last couple of novels, he is only getting better.

Saramago became known outside the Portuguese speaking world with the translation of his 'Baltasar and Blimunda' in 1987 -- originally published in 1982. This extraordinary novel, set in 18'th century Portugal of excessive religiosity and colonial expansion, subverts the academic history by colliding historical characters (Scarlatti) and events (building a convent in Mafra) with his protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda and their indestructible love. He is historically accurate on the surface but at the same time he seems to indicate that in face of stark human drama history as a force is not so much irrelevant but a mis-constructed entity. This skepticism and the ardent desire to reconstruct history or myth with a penetratingly profound insight into human heart are also at the center of some of his other successes like 'The History of the Siege of Lisbon' or the controversial 'The Gospel According to Jesus Christ'. There is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind about the achievements of these works and I have greatly enjoyed reading them -- for Saramago, once one gets used to his idiosyncratic punctuations and setence structures, writes a prose that is as wise as it is addictive -- but the novels I like most are the ones where his powers are concentrated on the eternal quest for identity: who (or what) am I? There are three that I have in mind -- 'Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis', 'All The Names' and what in my humble opinion his most accomplished novel (even considering 'Blindness'), 'The Double'.

After pontificating about the futility of employing superlative degree in comparing artistic achievements, it is now time to succumb to the temptation of self-contradiction: Saramago truly is the most unique prose-stylist of our time. He records human frailty like a stoic but sometimes laughs at it with the rest of the bawdy crowds; his chiseled cynicism cuts through the superficiality of human vanity, egoism and the futility of our mundane preoccupations but he lacks no generosity in praising the occasional burst of authenticity, integrity and the redemptive possibilities of love. He is one of those rare writers who first makes you cherish the pleasures of your solitude, and then using the black magic of his prose forces you to look at yourself from a neutral point where you have arrived with the trappings of identify left behind, and you realize the force of the anguish that you have tried to mask with the indulgence of solitude. Finishing a novel like The Double you find yourself in that indescribable state of mind that one has after a long meditation: you sense more, you see more, you realize more, you are more alert to the subterranean currents of self-deception and violence, but you are no more quite sure of yourself. Your existence now equates to a question that you yourself cannot articulate.

In 'The Double' Saramago uses the technique of literal enactment of human psychology he so perfectly employs in 'Blindness' where a whole population is plagued by the psychosis of agnosia. In 'The Double', the sacred inner drama of identity is played out in the external world. The strongest human attachment is the attachment to the sense of an inviolable and irreducible self that is unique by the sheer fact of its existence. That is, an unique identity that is a priori. I already am and I already am different from the rest. The protagonist of 'The Double', a history teacher named Tertuliano Maximo Alfonso -- Saramago is never short on thesis about the methods and relevance of teaching history -- finds, quite accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally but that is a dilemma Saramago leaves intentionally unresolved to heighten the effects of the startling, almost sinister, last chapter) that he has an exact replica. A stable movie actor of modest success, Antonio Claro, resembles him in every respect, down to those marks of suffering and pleasure that time leaves behind, when they stand in their naked skin. Their voices are identical. Though their professional and personal lives are very much different and they live in two different ends of the city of Lisbon, once they become cognizant of each others' existence their actions mirror each other. Somewhat unconsciously they play out an atavistic war game of social revenges that ends in tragedy, delivered in the guise of another accident. Tertuliano survives, but just only. A new life seems to invite him with open arms and there is the possibility that this time around he will fulfill the human promise of his soul that he till now has just only had a glimpse of, but there also seems to be the possibility that he is going to make the same mistakes once again.

It is very hard to resist the temptation of bringing up the strikingly similar notion of 'I'-ness and its ephemeral quality in Buddhist thought. But I will resist it nonetheless and will suggest that The Double is read within the tradition of Stoicism but not overly so. Saramago is a novelist and comparing him to Epictetus or Marucs Aurelius will serve no purpose. And to be absolutely balanced in our approach, Saramago, the great novelist he is, is neither in favor nor in against of detachment. And moreover, he is not at all oblivious to the possibilities and pleasures of genuine human love and affection. But the omnipresent, omniscient and incorporeal narrator of 'The Double' shows the wisdom of the Stoic thought in the words he says as much in how he says them.

'The Double' can also be read as a not-so-obvious homage to the heteronyms of the finest Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Along with T.S.Eliot and Rilke, Pessoa is my favorite poet. But beyond his physical existence, Pessoa is not really a single poet. He wrote under many names, whom he called his heteronyms, and for all of these heteronyms he created elaborate biographies, endowed them with characters and adventures. In his own mental universe, he lived the lives of those heteronyms. In the external world these poets and writers played out an elaborate drama of writing letters to each other, writing about each other or debating with each other on newspapers. They all, of course, wrote in different styles and some of the heteronyms themselves went through the typical stylistic evolutions in different phases of their careers. Saramago earlier had written a novel -- 'Year Of the Death of Ricard Reis' -- dedicated to one of these heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, who in Saramago's version returns to Lisbon from Brazil and dies exactly an year after Fernando Pessoa, the real poet, dies. Ricardo Reis is, of course, one of Pessoa's heteronyms and along with Alberto Caeiro and Alvaro De Campos is among the most well-known ones. Pessoa also had what he called -- half grudgingly, half lovingly -- a semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, who wrote that magnificent factless autobiography 'The Book Of Disquiet' I am in the process of slowly assimilating.

Tertuliano Maximo, the history teacher from 'The Double', suggests that we should be teaching and learning history from present to past, in the reverse chronological order. An excellent idea, and I would like to continue my humble exposition on the history of contingent identity among the writings of Saramago and Fernando Pessoa(s) in the reverse chronological order. Here ends the part 1.

The Men Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities is often praised as the lesser known deity among the triumvirate of so-called twentieth-century masterworks, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu being the other two notables. One can only wonder how Ulrich himself -- Ulrich the skeptic surgeon operating on the metaphysically cancerous psyche of the turn of the century central Europe, Ulrich who is as rigorous in his passivity as he is in his analysis, Ulrich the protagonist of Robert Musil's magnum opus -- would have explained such tame categorization, categorization that smacks of worst kind of intellectual defeatism. How easily we have given in to the sterile lust for classification. If all the blarb writers and book critics are to be taken seriously, then reading Musil is supposed to complete an equatorial circle around some sort of a mental universe that one begins to traverse the moment one encounters Buck Mulligan meeting Stephan Dedalus down the staircase. As if all great novels in a particular century are tied together by some invisible thread of mutually recognizable aesthetic. The moment someone mentions three such disparate writes under one breath he creates an illusion, a very vulgar illusion of intellectual and artisitic kinship that often induces a bias towards a certain interpretation of a work, an interpretation that spectacularly fails to appreciate the gestalt, the aesthetic unity of that work.

The most common criticism that I have heard usually made against The Man Without Qualities is something like this -- "After reading Proust, Musil just doesn't cut it.He is so dry and acerbic and overly abstract. The characters are not well formed. Not much of a plot." This of course is the voice of prevailing bias towards psychological realism. A great novel has its own manifest intelligence in its organization, in its structure, in its psychological insights, in its conscious as well as accidental tricks of creating a mirage of labyrinth by reflecting a thin slice of time and place on a house of mirrors, in its own sonority. But a great novel is almost never single-mindedly cerebral, it never risks the creation and exposition of original philosophical ideas with the logical rigor of a philosopher through its landscape of characters and events, it almost never consciously rejects the subterranean appeal of viscerality (or of charm, each depends on the other). Robert Musil, more specifically in his unfinished The Man Without Qualities ( some of his earlier works, especially Young Torless can be read in the context of contemporary literature with its psychological exploration and political metaphors), is a notable exception. The originality of Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften -- that is how it is known in German and in translation all the connotations of the orignal 'Eigenschaften' are lost -- lies in its relentless epistemological quest to reach at the heart of all human experiences and intercourses, in its uncompromising exploration of spiritual decay all married to a precise and accurate evocation of the turn of the century Viennese aristocracy.

The temptation of mentioning Herman Broch's The Sleepwalkers while talking about The Man Without Qualities is overwhelming, notwithstanding all the obvious differences between them. In Broch's trilogy the somnambulists are the people who are trapped between the death of old value systems and birth of new ones which in Broch's view are becoming less and less ethical since the beginning of Renaissance. In the third part of the trilogy,chronicling the post-war chaos of Germany in the 1920s, there is an wonderful essay, interspersed with the narrative thread, about the disintegration of values. If we are to risk an oversimplification, the sleepwalkers Broch talk about are spiritually regressing at every juncture of history towards becoming, more and more, Men Without Qualities.

One can hardly argue with such a thoery if one is to look at some of the modern critical works and encounter the intellectual void, the total absence of any rigor, at the center of those works. An example in case is Joachim Köhler's Nietzsche and Wagner:A Lesson In Subjugation. It is a bit of celebrity sensationalism veiled in haphazard psychological pretensions and a forced and repetitive analogy to the Greek myth of Ariadne (and hence a theory about some intellectual-sexual labyrinth, mentioned ad nauseam!). Nietzsche is claimed to be a weak homosexual (without much proof but based on speculations about Wagner and Cosima's speculative remarks) who was originally exploited by Wagner to do mundane deeds insulting to Nietzsche the philosopher and the man. Apparently Wagner later singularly went after that same Nietsche because of his homosexuality. In a strange and twisted way, Cosima and Nietzsche are supposed to be kindred spiritis because of their oppressive childhoods which by the way, also opened them up for easy subjugation by Wagner. Nietzsche's works are not analyzed for what they are but what possible impact they might have had on Wagner. And the list goes on...

Lately I saw an wonderful Danish movie, The Inheritance (Director Per Fly), which chronicles the descent of a man into loneliness and spiritual disscoiation from his surroundings. A man who loses the things that he cared for and he built assiduously simply because of his inability to make moral decisions and own responsibility for them. Christoffer, to follow Musil literaly, is a modern day man without Qualities.

The Inheritance, in some superficial aspects, resembles Visconti's The Damned. The Damned also is about the control of a steel factory but the background is the power struggle of the post-WWI Germany and the movie ends immediately after 'The Night Of The Long Knives'. However admirable Visconit's camerawork might have been, I still think to judge by his otherwise lofty standard The Damned is a failure. There is too much kitsch, an overabundance of commonplace symbolism, that ruins the movie. A kind of hysterical extremity that ruins some of the later movies of Fellini too. But that is for another day...

Calvino to Kiarostami: Shifting Grounds, Inward Looks

In the post-Derridan world where everything is text Italo Calvino wrote as if text is everything. One can easily guess his intellectual kinship with Borges and subterranean influences of those great self-reflective narratives like The Decameron or The Arabian Nights. It is not entirely correct to claim, as has been famously done, that he dreams the perfect dreams for us. The universe he imagines sometimes transcends the world of dreams which, however infinite it might be, still lies within the sphere of human experience -- conscious, subconscious or unconscious. In 'Cosmicomics' or 'The Invisible Cities' he creates sovereign worlds whose inhabitants look down amusingly, condescendingly but never disdainfully, with mischievous glints in their eyes to the hapless world of ours where we are trapped by the indefatigable laws -- of physics, of desires, of dreams or of fictions.

But 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' -- probably his most admired work, at least in the English speaking world -- is less of a maverick as it is intricately bound to one of the most inviolable laws of literary world: the co-dependency of the reader-writer relationship. Its ingenuity lies not in marvelous imaginings but its profoundly original meditations on the act of reading as a solitary and difficult attempt -- not without manifold pleasures -- to construct an assuring universe of continuity that is comforting in its diametrical difference from the absurd arbitrariness of everyday life. The novel starts with two Readers -- let us designate them with a capital R; both are voracious readers that enjoy reading for its own sake unlike some other stereotypes in the novel who value a novel only to the extent of materials that it provides for critical dissemination -- starting up a new novel only to discover that it has the first chapter repeated throughout the book. Both rush to the bookstore and get a corrected copy which then turns out to be an altogether different novel. Just when they were drawn in this new novel they discover it is not the novel it is supposed to be but because of a mistake on the part of the translator they are reading a novel translated from a now forgotten language whose only living expert claims that the translation itself is a translation from a falsified version of the original; the falsified version is claimed to be the original by a different author of another forgotten country which was an historical enemy of the first country. Every time they start another novel they always have to abandon it after the first chapter for reasons that continue to get more obscure and strange more the novel progresses. The search for a self-complete narrative puts them at the center of an international conspiracy between text terrorists, a diabolical translator and his organization that now has turned against him, a publishing firm that manufactures novels of a famous author but nobody can differentiate the manufactured novels from the original writings of the author.

The Readers read the first chapters of ten different novels. Between those novels the Calvino voice chronicles their frantic search for the next chapters of the narrative that they had to stop reading at suspenseful moments. Each of those 'first-chapter-of-the-novel' within the novel is written in a different style. And all of them are brilliant pastiches of different literary genre: noir, espionage, political intrigue, romance etc. And if they are read outside the context of this book they stand out as the examples of the best writings every genre has to provide -- assuredly written, full of wisdom and wit. So the readers of Calvino's novel can easily sympathize with the Readers in Calvino's novel for not being able to finish any of these very promising narratives.

It is easy to guess at the obvious abstractions that Calvino presents in the book: reading beyond the restrictions of a singular canonical interpretation, the dynamic nature of writer-reader relationship, the idea of reading itself being an abstraction that the reader constructs to be able to better orient himself while reading a new narrative, the intrinsic anxiety of reading and the release from that anxiety as a self-perpetuating cycle. Calvino's spectacular success in this beguiling novel of ideas rely not only on those abstractions but also his flawless mastery of the narrative craft which he though occasssionally subterfuges -- with an impish grin -- he never rejects. This book is as much about the power of writing as it is about the freedom of the reader from that power.

While reading 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' after a long time I wondered if there exists an equivalent in the cinema: a cinema about the director-viewer relationship. Godard, especially Prenom:Carmen, comes to mind. But a relatively closer equivalent in cinema to Calvino's masterpiece can be found in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's 'Close-Up'. It does not have the searing poeticism and mystical anguish of 'Taste of Cherry' or the complex social commentary of 'Ten', but is as rewarding a cinema as any of his other movies. It is self-reflective the way 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' is. The movie is about the making of a documentary of the trial of a cinema lover who poses as the Iranian film director (and Kiarostami's close friend) Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Cyclist, Gabbeh) to another cinema loving family and promises to cast the family in his next movie. The poseur himself, like the family, is a great fan of Makhmalbaf and has taught himself about the art of movie making by reading though he never had any practical experience of directing. He stages detailed rehearsals in the family house and enjoys their hospitality. The impostor is caught and brought into trial and the trial is shot in a documentary style for the movie is ostensibly about the making of the documentary. The trial reveals the inherent ambiguity of the impostor’s motives: money or fame or a symbolic gesture regarding the fundamental irreconcilability between art and life or maybe a pure love of cinema as the impersonator claims originally. The movie ends happily, the impersonator meets the real Makhmalbaf, played of course by Makhmalbaf himself, and he is forgiven by all. But the uneasiness of the treacherous questions regarding the imprecise, shifting relationship between the director, the medium and its audience remains embedded as an open, almost pre-articulate question in the movie-goer’s psyche much after he has finished watching Kiarostami’s little gem.

Rimbaud in Andaman

The aboriginal tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar islands -- well by now I guess everyone (who may be reading this blog) knows where those islands are -- are grouped into two categories.The natives of Nicobar islands are mostly of Mongoloid descents -- Shompen,Nicobarese and others -- who have been gradually integrated into the 'mainstream', a 'mainstream' that was created,sustained and defined by the continuous influx of outsiders from British to Tamils.

The Andamanese tribes, primarily of negrito origin, have been more fortunate in preserving their identities and less fortunate in surviving. Among the four tribes living in the Andaman islands , the Great Andamanese and Onge people -- weakened by new diseases and the drastic changes in their lives brought in by the settlers -- are now almost extinct. The Jarawas, who first appeared in a typically dehumanized role in modern literature as early as nineteenth century in the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Sign of Four', were on the verge of extinction before the Supreme Court of India, in a brave and path-breaking ruling in 2002, ordered the closure of a road that ran through the Jarawa territory and removal of all settlers from that territory. The authorities, showing what must be accepted as equally unprecedented initiative, have strongly acted on the court orders leaving the Jarawas alone. Jarawas, for their part, had never underestimated the threat posed by the outsiders and their unguarded hostilities towards all attempts at assimilation were indicative of their profound knowledge about the secrets of their own survival. The remaining Andaman tribe, the Sentilese, have been more successful in maintaining their distance from the outsiders and their lives have been least contaminated.

Fortunately, in spite of having all the attributes of great tropical island tourist vacations including exciting snorkeling and diving opportunities, Andaman&Nicobar have only lately started to attract the imagination of the travellers. Because of its poor infrastructure, considerable distance from the Indian mainland, restricted access to foreigners and absence of any romanticized 'meaning-of-life' novel or movie set on the the islands (actually, absence of any written account accessible to the western populace; though Amitav Ghosh seems to be planning, going by the post-tsunami newspaper reports,to set his next novel among the Bengali refugees in Andaman, it is highly unlikely his realist prose and the keen eyes for human suffering would lure anyone into the pleasures of a tropical paradise ), Andaman and Nicobar have remained unknown even to the most adventurous and to the bravest exotic-hunters, the ones who end up in Kiribati or Tuvalu.

Then came the tsunami. A&N are now thoroughly devastated: thousands dead, some smaller islands have been obliterated from the face of earth, the survivors are weakened by disease and neglect, those unfortunate Bengalis, who after losing their home once because of the brutalities of post-partition reality were forced to come to the these islands and farmed these low-lying infertile islands (an agricultural achievement of not insignificant magnitude) and created a new home for them, are again homeless and helpless, all their lives' works destroyed . It would take forever to bring normalcy back to those islands.

At least to most of those islands. The Jarawa and the Sentilese people, surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), are more or less unharmed-- without any death count or any significant impact on their everyday existence. The acknowledged reason is that in contrast to the outside settlers, they usually live on elevated areas in their respective islands. Another reason could easily be conjectured and that is they have learnt to decipher the signals of such imminent disaster in the ground beneath their feet, in the hustle of the ocean waves, in the chirping of birds. After all they have been living in these islands for thousands of years and their collective memory of nature goes too far back into the past; the rest of us do not remember any disaster of comparable magnitude in Bay of Bengal in the last few centuries. Would it be inconceivable to imagine the Jarawas, after the tsunami, celebrating the destruction of the invading devils and worshiping the sea god for their new found liberation from the grip of foreigners? Or will that be too much of a forced acknowledgement of their humanity?

At the tender age of nineteen, after completely reinventing himself, Rimbaud joined the Dutch army and came to Java. He stayed there for a month or so before leaving on a British ship -- after this trip he would end up first in Cyprus and then in North Africa, smuggling guns among other jobs, sending money home and not writing poetry, not probably even thinking about poetry. I do not know which route that ship took, but it is not hard to imagine the ship slowly moving through the Straits of Malacca, falling into the Andaman sea and then travelling southward and then westward through Indian ocean. As this had already happened in past, at least in one of the many possible pasts, there is no harm in continuing with our imagination about the fate of his journey, an alternative past. We can easily imagine him as a ship-wreck barely managing to swim (given his weak constitution and an youth spent too eagerly) to the shore of an Andaman island, the Jarawas rescuing him and making him first a hard working slave (out of suspicion) and then a wise member in the council (because of his manifest intelligence). Would this have been the life that Rimbaud always wanted to escape to? The unsentimental clarity, the brutal tango of nature and man, the atavistic memory of which we all, mostly the poet who desired nothing but the blinding light of the absolute past, carry within us.

(Paul Schmidt's translation)

It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of sun become sea.

Oh my sentinel soul,
Let us desire
The nothing of night
And the day on fire.

Africa and Antonioni's obscure gems

I have never been sure of how to formulate my response to Antonioni movies. My favorite directors are Tarkovsky, Bunuel and Bergman and in my humble opinion everyone else -- including my childhood favorites Ray and Kurosawa and the ever irresistible darling of intellectuals, Godard -- falls a step shorter of this triumvirate. Bergman praised Tarkovsky in 'The Magic Lantern' as someone, I am quoting from memory, who is roaming naturally in rooms on the doors of which Bergman has been hammering all his life. I think the same is true for the rest of the directors and these three. Maybe except for Robert Bresson.

As I continue to play this pointless game of categorization -- based purely on my subjective opinion, of course --in my mind, I try to put the rest of the great Directors in 2-3 more groups. (The absolute subjectivity of my categories is better illustrated by the following facts: I have not much ideas about Wajda or Dreyer as I have rarely seen any movies by them and I am a big fan of Paradjanov,Werner Herzog and Ozu but do not really like too many Passolini or Fellini or Eisenstein movies whereas the film academia would probably put a Fellini or a Eisenstein a thousand miles ahead of the eccentric genius of Herzog or the enigmatic poetry of Paradjanov's spiritual journey) . So I put Ray,Kurosawa,Truffaut,Ozu,Godard in one group and Herzog, Ghatak, Paradjanov in another group etc. Whenever I play this game I could never put Antonioni in any group.

I mean, he has a movie where a fashion photographer unknowingly enters in a Yardbird concert and he has a movie where a bored novelist (and a bored husband) is attracted to a society girl over a Broch novel. He has created 'Red Desert' , a magnificent portrait of existential ennui and spiritual emptiness, and he has created 'Zabriskie Point', an immature and over-simplified appreciation of counter-culture whose best attraction till date remains those early Pink Floyd songs.

'The Passenger', on the other hand is captivating. For whatever reasons best known to the studios it is not available in DVD format (so are a lot of other Antonioni movies) and no new VHS has been released for a while. Finally I managed to buy a used copy from Amazon. Watching 'The Passenger' and the last (and the least praised) of the trilogy -- the other two being L'Avventura and La Notte -- L'Eclisse , one can't help but wonder at his genuine attraction for Africa, less as a geo-political entity but more as an alternative mode of human existence which has, if nothing else, at least the solemnity of a profound mystery which, or the absence of which, is at the heart of Antonioni's aesthetic and his critique of modern society. The desert scenes in 'The Passenger' are strongly reminiscent of the few Camus short stories set in the North African Sahara. The depth of wonder expressed in those visuals trivialize the political corruption that is depicted later. In 'The Passenger', a famous but bored reporter finally finds the inspiration and the actual physical means of changing his identity to be able to create a new self in search of a way out of his malaise. In L'Eclisse, Africa comes via the memory of a woman (who is now a bored housewife) who spent her youth in Kenya, killing Hippos and dancing like the tribal women. She considers Kenya her home, is proud of its natural beauty but very critical of its people -- "there are 10 odd leaders who probably have studied in Oxford, but the rest of them are monkeys". Antonioni uses her character very subtly -- he contrasts it nicely with Monica Vitti's dance in tribal costume -- and there is a hint of ridicule (and sympathy) in the way she is treated.

L'Eclisse was released in 1962, on the verge of Kenya's independence, and even after all these years the western perception of Africa has remained more or less the same -- a large homogenized territory in perpetual crisis of famine, calamities, corrupt leaders, tribal fights and now, of course, AIDS. Africa continues to be viewed primarily as a problem whose salvation depends on the charity of well-meaning rock stars or the cultural evolution of the African societies. Even otherwise well-meaning and highly educated people tend to discuss 'the African problem' as if Africa is a small singular nation populated by a handful of races. The uniqueness of all the individual countries -- what is happening in Zimbabwe is drastically different from what is happening in Liberia -- and the sheer complexity of Africa as a geographical/political/cultural entity is conveniently ignored. Actually the only common thread between all the problems of 'Africa' is its colonial past.

Then there are writers like VS Naipul, a man of Indian origin who has grown up in Trinidad, who invents an Africa where everyone of color (may it be the Indian traders or the native African students) is devoid of grace, possibilities, redemption. That is the crux of his 'A Bend In The River'. A book that I should have not re-read.

Which Africa do you want?

Pamuk: a post-modern master

Somewhat fatigued wading through the labyrinthine prose of Saramago and the socio-political-literary cricket writings of CLR James (I like both these writers immensely but reading them at the same time was a bit too much), I picked up Orhan Pamuk's 'My Name Is Red' , not knowing much about Pamuk's already formidable reputation.

It has been a while I have felt so strongly drawn towards any novel. Like reading Camus's 'The Fall' for the first time, or reading Dostoyevsky or Marquez or Rushdie for the first time.

Pamuk's novel depicts the world of master miniaturists in Ottoman Istanbul: highly skilled, inspired, ambitious,devoted but at the same time torn between tradition and European influences, tormented by religious guilt, suspicious of each other and vulnerable to religious and state persecution. Pamuk has masterfully handled the timeless conflicts in art -- between individualism and tradition, between innovation and orthodoxy, between the sacred and the secular. Each short chapter in the novel is written from the perspective of one of its protagonists and in that chapter the focus is entirely on him/her. On another level, apparently all these chapters are being told by a storyteller who himself is a character of the novel (an irreverent satirist and an eventual victim of religious zealots). The center of the novel is not any particular character but interplay of ideas and an enigmatic, unsure romance. Both these abstractions continuously change their shape but always in some ways reflecting each other. The narrative is given its surface unity by a murder mystery which is eventually solved by the secrets of the sub-conscious signatures an artist leaves behind.

Another dimension of the novel is the perennial internal conflicts in Islamic thought and its uncertain balancing act of philosophical curiosity and religious absolutism, virile sensuality and austere habits.Though the novel is set in 16'th century Istanbul (Pamuk makes the city as starkly vivid as Dostoyevsky made St. Petersburg), those conflicts are still fundamental to the appreciation and proper understanding of Islamic civilization.

Pamuk is not only a master of building layers upon layers of potent symbolism, an accurate painter of moods and places, a playful erudite and a tireless interpreter of history, he can nervelessly bring together sublime meditation on the nature of divinity with very raw description of sexuality. But if one knows about Sufism (even if only has read Rumi) then his frankness shouldn't surprise.

I was fortunate in having some knowledge (thanks to growing up in India in a very historically conscious childhood, thanks to my parents) about miniature painting, the history of Persia, Ottoman empire, Tamer Lane and the Mongol influence in west and southern Asia , the Moguls empire and Sufism before reading this novel. Having at least some rudimentary ideas about Islamic history and Ottoman Empire is a must to enjoy all the aspects of this novel.

Pamuk, one feels, has thrown a few sly punches to that traditional western thinking that Edward Said so aptly called 'Orientalism'. He shows how the Turkish artists and intellectuals in the height of Ottoman glory looked down at the then European art forms and how the ordinary citizens in Istanbul had hardly contained contempt for Venetians (‘counterfeiters’, 'without shame' , 'anarchic'). The table will of course be turned just a few hundred years from then and the invention of an imaginary Orient (as imaginary as the uncultured Venetians of Ottoman artists) will begin. The novel ends with that premonition.

Plan to start Pamuk's 'The Snow' now.