Philosophy, Poetry and Nirmaldasan

-- This review appeared in the March 2018 issue of The Spark. --

In this modern world where language has been shrinking owing to the cellphone SMS constraints and also owing to man’s tense rush towards everything, I doubt whether poetry is still keeping its own. Anyone nowadays sits alone, staring at the variant configurations happening in clouds, at the half-circular line-up of lovely birds rushing towards the skies as if going to garland the heavens and utters charming lines, assuming the Wordsworthian solitary reaper’s tone or the Keatsian nightingale’s chirping tone? Modern man will brand as lunatics Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley, if they are reborn (if you have faith in reincarnation).

Well! All these thoughts kept on swarming my mind, when I happened to read my friend, philosopher and guide and poet, Nirmaldasan’s Flights of Vedanta, a collection of his poems in just a 41-page book form. Before reviewing his book, I would like to give a brief intro about Nirmaldasan, a poet, who has six collections of poetry to his credit including the present one under review. The other six are: An Eaglet In The Skies (1996), A Pocket Book of Rhymes (2006), Silver Jubilee and Other Poems (2008), Borrowed Robes (Translations, 2012) and Ode to Gaia (2015). Apart from that, he has his own online collections of poetry: Rocking Pegasus (2002), Literary Trivia and Curiosities (2004), A Quiver of Arrows (2007), The Pleasures of Indolence (2014), The Passionate Verses and Other Translations (2015), Poetry Workbook (2016), Playful Poesy (2017) and The Vision of The Baptist (2017).

Nirmaldasan is the pen name of N. Waltson Solomon, an independent communication consultant. His long association with Dr. Nirmal Selvamony has resulted in the tinai series 1-3 (2001-04) in which some of his best poems were published. He has co-edited Essays In Ecocriticism (2007) along with Dr. Selvamony and Dr. Rayson K. Alex. He is the creator of the Green Density Measure, an ecocritical tool for analyzing literary texts, and the Strain Index, a formula for measuring readability. Most of his writings are available at Nirmaldasan home page: https://www.angelfire.com/nd/ nirmaldasan

Nirmaldasan is my co-poet and Watson my dear friend. We share a common past, having worked in The Hindu for years. I still recall our heated discussions on literature that we had almost daily as train chugged along from St Thomas Mount to Egmore and in the roaring bus from Egmore to Cindatharipet. Time intervened and separated us, yet the literary companionship and personal friendship are still remaining intact, refusing to be withered by age. Now ... over to the book, Flights of Vedanta.

Too familiar with his writings, I am afraid of sounding personally lenient while reviewing his book. First of all, what impressed me most was the way Nirmaldasan brought his profound knowledge of English literature and Indian mythologies to bear on his work. Great poets’ influence is quite evident on his use of choice words and on his felicity for expressions. The onomatopoeia technique which great poets such as Kamban in Tamil and Shakespeare in English used is made use of aptly and skillfully in the following lines in ‘Dance of Shiva’:

The beat, the beat, again the beat;
How calm this time it falls — how sweet!
Ah, behold, yonder springs to view
The hand that holds the Damaru.		
Now springs a universe of form,			
A sea of change, of calm and storm!
Behold, behold, his calm visage;
See him dance on every stage.

Lord Shiv dances in front of our naked eyes. That is the power of this poem that carries you into the supernatural world of devotion. The poet spreads his wings across the wide expanse of skies, even as words tumble out of his tongue like a divine torrent.

As T. S. Eliot says, wit is the combination of two unlikely things. What look like things apart to ordinary folks are the two sides of the same coin to a poet. One cannot see any connection between a Upanishad and chess. But Nirmaldasan weaves a thread between the two in his poem ‘Chaturangopanishad: Chess Philosophy.’ Even the chess game brings the philosophical poet out of Nirmaldasan as these lines amply demonstrate:

For God, as Einstein said, does play no dice!
And the Hand that moves the king, moves the pawn;
And the Lord to every piece roles assigned
And decreed, “Perform well thy task and shine!”

Like in the chess game, in life too everything is shrouded in illusion that is called in Indian philosophy ‘Maya’. We are all bound by the threads spun by Maya. That is what these lines says:

As a spider weaves its web to ensnare,
So Maya spins her invisible threads.

Nirmaldasan whose earlier poetry had the bubbling spirit has now withdrawn himself into serene woods and magical meditation. That explain abundantly why his present volume has the hallmark of a Socrates or for that matter, Adi Shankar. Maybe, the wrinkles of canal that Time has dug up on his face have been translated themselves into this Flights of Vedanta.