VISITING PASTURES GREEN

Nirmal Selvamony

In the moving waters of his mind’s mirror Eliot saw a reflection of his society. He spelt it out and called it Waste Land. But it did not quite resemble the faces of his foremothers and forefathers. Some of the prominent features of this societal face were: -- the land laid waste by the world wars, the lonely level sands in which lay half-buried the agnostic, existentialist anti-heroes, and the non-descript metropolises of the homeless absurdists.

But why did Eliot choose to reflect such a face? Was it because this was what he saw? In that case his theory that the poetic waters should reflect not only the pretty face and bust, but also ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system and the digestive tracts’ contributes in no small measure to the devastation of this planet.

But the society has other faces too—the high peaks and slopes of the mountains, the perennial rivers, and the eternal sea coasts. The Tamils knew about this and conceptualised this in their own ways. Those days only the mountains and the scrubs were desertified either due to overgrazing or fire or drought. But man has launched a massive project of desertification by plundering, abusing, and polluting the environment. If the Industrial Revolution engineered this process of destruction, modern western science (the cutting edge of rationalism), anthropocentrism and capitalism have accelerated it beyond control. The result is a waste land.

In a way Eliot is right. In recording a fact, yes. But his worthy predecessor Arnold taught him that fact was not the domain of poetry, but of history. That the basis of poetry was the idea. If that is so, when the historical facts about the first half of the twentieth century failed poetry, the idea underlying those facts should have sustained it. Now, what is that idea? Eliot would have summarized it thus: that there is no hope for the phoenix’s next birth, that chance will eventually frustrate right, that love cannot conquer the world and turn the earth green, that the world has lost its meaning – in short, that everything has been laid waste.

But is this idea acceptable to all the people of the world? Or even to those of the western world for whom Eliot plays the spokesperson? Did not Hopkins’s (1844-1889) persona affirm ‘And for all this nature is never spent/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’? Has history proved Hopkins wrong? Has that ‘dearest freshness’ disappeared completely from the depths? Would not Hopkins have said the same thing if he would have lived through the world wars, acid rain and other sophisticated forms of environmental destruction? Would he not have proclaimed, ‘A lioness arose breasting the babble/A prophetess towered in the tumult’ and proudly heralded his heroine emerging from the wrecked Deutschland of today’s earth? Did not Victor Frankl survive the Nazi concentration camp by virtue of his unshakeable faith in the power of what he called ‘logos’ (meaning) and develop his special brand of psychoanalysis known as ‘logotherapy’? Like Hopkins and Frankl, Nirmaldasan is also focussing our attention on the greener part of the landscape.

Pastures Green can be read in many ways – as a piece about ‘transformation’ both social and personal; about the several personae of the soul that seeks green pastures (interestingly, Saiva Siddhanta speaks of the soul as a cow); about food/power, transformative power, moral power, power of knowledge; or about some other thing.

However, let me make an attempt to read Pastures Green in the light of the category of space. Viewing from this angle, we can see that the green pastures are located in two spaces – in the beyond, a future space, and in the here and now, a present space. If the green pastures lie in the beyond for the personae such as the speaker of the Phoenix section, Panchali, Gandhi and Sita, they lie in and constitute the present space to Siddartha, the protagonist of the last section. As the beyond, green pastures have to be achieved, or reached by the speaker of the Phoenix section, Panchali, Gandhi and Sita. Unlike these, Siddartha realizes that the pastures do not lie anywhere else but only where he is present at any given moment.

The concept of the beyond or future space collapses both time and space. It is something which can be achieved only in time future. It remains a destination, a telos of a present action. The speaker-persona of the Phoenix section tells us that to a sower a town is green pasture, and so is the transformed world the speaker visualizes. To Panchali and the Pandavas, the deep dark woods lying beyond the town, battlefield, and the court were green pasture. The third section characterises the beyond as tao, lying as a covetable space of honour won by the conqueror of the self. Gandhi was one such victor whose weapon was love. The beyond in the next section is a moral space of chastity and innocence. By going through the fire ordeal, Sita laid claim to it.

Unlike all the above varieties of green pasture, the one in the last section shows the here and the now, the present space as the one sought after. The seer-persona Siddhartha learns that the river that flows beside him is that beyond which has all the answers to his questions. If only he could become like a lotus leaf in the river, there is much to learn from the riverine here and now which is also at the same time, the beyond.

It is commonly known that Waste Land is cast in free verse, a genre that can be traced to pre-modern times when it did not enjoy the kind of patronage it does now. Without mincing words, it should be identified as a pseudo-literary form. Many writers of modern times beginning from Walt Whitman and Eliot dabbled in this and some, like Eliot, even tried to legitimise it theoretically arguing that it is the most appropriate form to express the spirit of the age. True, the war-torn Europe was fragmented at several levels—familial, psychological, religious, economic and so on. But how does one represent fragmentation aesthetically? By fragmented form? By abandoning the very rules of the game? Instead of finding an appropriate unfragmented form by either modifying the existing ones, or by making a new one, the leading lights of the modern age advocated the adoption of broken forms. Ironically, the new aestheticians began to look for the non-existent rules among the ruleless ruinous heaps of words. In this wild, queer theoretical search, the conventional borderline concepts and techniques came handy. One such was arhythmicity in musical time. It is true that off-beats and staccato rhythm in a regular, measured musical composition can enhance musical value, even as grace notes can. But to treat off-beats and grace notes as normative, regular musical features is perversion.

Accordingly, time measure is a norm in poetry (even as it is in verse). It is for this reason that literature in Tamil is known as ilakkiyam. This word literally means ‘target (end) music’ and by extension of meaning, that which is end-oriented and musical. This word can be contrasted with ilakkan@am, grammar. Literally, ilakkan@am is ‘target nearness’. If language in both literature and grammar is end-oriented, only literature has the additional feature of musical language. Both ‘end-orientedness’ and ‘musical language’ need brief explanation. End-orientedness can be interpreted at least in two ways. If ilakku could be the goal or end of life, it refers to the three ultimate values, namely, virtue (ar\am), wealth (porul@), and happiness (in\pam). But if it is taken to mean ‘purposefulness’, it might remind us of the need for poetic/literary language to be maximally purposeful or semantically effective. This could be understood as semantic virtues like expressiveness (clarity, perspicuity and so on), and valuable/useful meaning. Negatively, it could be a call to avoid unproductive ambiguity and semantic triviality. But the term iyam referring to the musical quality of poetic language is significant. It emphasizes the musical quality of poetic language. Language becomes musical only when it is measured. Obviously, language is measured by prosodical conventions like syllable, feet, line and stanza which are variously defined in different languages according to the culture and tradition of each language community. This means that every language has devised its own system of measuring language forming various verbal designs known as verse forms.

The word ‘design’ is significant here. It brings out the relationship between the part and the whole. In a sense, it is true that whenever we speak we measure out language in some way or the other. But a certain chunk of our speech consisting of, say, ten sentences is not designed even as a stanza is. This is because all the sentences in a speech chunk do not follow a common measure system unlike a stanza or verse form. Therefore, the argument from ‘speech rhythm’, namely, advocating speech rhythm as the basis of verse/poetry is unacceptable and hollow.

It is unfortunate that Eliot embraced such a hollow argument and based his poetic practice on it. Waste Land, which resulted from such a project, is a negative monument in the poetic landscape which should rather inspire artists to avoid than take Eliot’s poetic road.

Though a companion piece, in matters of content, Pastures Green faithfully avoids Waste Land as bad company, by highlighting the existing green pastures among the ruins and rubble. It is hard to tell how this is possible. Is it because the writer has an Eastern background which still has not lost sight of the green pastures? Or is it because the writer is a resolute optimist? Or because of some other reason I cannot figure out now? In deed, the attempt is laudable.

Formally, Pastures Green is more than a good companion to Waste Land that does not lead the reader into the slough of formlessness, but elevates him/her to planes of verbal pleasure by donning the garb of syllabism. The reader may confidently hold the hand of a poet whose poetry has always been poetry.