Analysis Of The Lie Of Dawns: Poems By Jayanta Mahapatra
The Lie of Dams collects veteran poet Jayanta Mahapatra's own selections from his poetic works of more than three decades, and reflects the poet's persistent preoccupations: the relationship between the self and the other, the distance between the one who is aware and the object of his awareness, and the true nature of reality. The intangibility inherent in the core of human existence has been the prime motif in Mahapatra's poetry. The collected volume under review here yet again shows how his melancholic endeavor to seize the truth and reason of living often leads to a questing lyricism that confronts the elusiveness of the world within and about him. The crossover quality of his reflection lends Mahapatra's poetry a psychedelic fervor as he tries to document the arcane flux at once connecting and separating him and the world. Then, his usually languid pace suddenly gathers momentum and transforms itself into an ardent expression as it does here: Now you don't even want me to write my poem, of those words which spit blood and vomit and speak of malice, but only those which shut out the wind and lay them in the dark crevices of stone for births to merge into darker births that look for the age-old grass of my death beyond its contemplation and its withering.
Beyond his seemingly passive voice, Mahapatra is clearly an interpreter of the condition of humanity as encrypted in the culture of which he is a part. And this culture is a complex one as far as he is concerned. On the one hand, he converses with a past from which he had been alienated due to his grandfather's conversion to Christianity in 1866 in the wake of the famine that struck Orissa, and his own English education. On the other, the fast pace of the contemporary world and the state of his immediate environment disconcert him. Mahapatra's use of images such and 'spit', 'blood' and 'vomit' as seen above is integrally linked to this dialectical perception of relationships in the culture in which he finds himself. Yet, from behind this shadow, Mahapatra looks eagerly at nature and childhood as his anchors. They seem the mainstays of his poetry against the "designs of success" and the "freedom of power" that have afflicted today's world. He seeks images of freshness and hope in his dreams of the untainted nature that lie beyond all that is gruesome and grotesque in the world about him Beyond the trees, the river is a vision of purpose moving on its own knees trying to keep a world further from anything bent on the freedom of power, of footsteps whose plots merely shape designs of success.
And again, the poetry of guilt, pain and depression finds its relief and redemption in a childhood that so effortlessly celebrates nature, despite the ennui and want of the adult world about her: A ten-year-old girl combs her mother's hair where crows of rivalries are quietly nesting. The home will never be hers In a corner of her mind a living green mango drops softly to earth. The mango that drops softly to earth in the girl's imagination, defying all the rivalries in this world, becomes a potent symbol when one reads it along with what Mahapatra has written elsewhere: My observation is limited to the process of my falling, and neither the law of falling bodies nor the general theory of relativity still the wing.
The Indian landscape here becomes the starting point of the poet's imagination, and it takes off into the interiors of his mind that is fed by the logic of science on the one hand (remember his earlier career as a physicist) and awed by the limitlessness of the act of living on the other. He comes out of that puzzle with a realization that no scientific theory or law about the inevitable fall of objects can stop the wing of imagination from aspiring to fly high. Then, one sees how deep-seated Mahapatra's faith is in the power of imagination as the only resistance against all clinical intimations of death, and how this poet deconstructs the world of definitions and known possibilities with the tool of his poetry that plumbs the depths of desire and lust for a truly meaningful moment. Such a close reading alone would reveal the hope hidden in the seeming gloom of Mahapatra's poetry. If this is the discourse in which Mahapatra engages us with respect to logic and imagination, he deals with the question of 'time' in a really unique way. As mentioned earlier, his grandfather Chintamani Mahapatra's embracing Christianity acts as a landmark event in shaping the grandson's poetic vision of time as an agent of connection and separation, at once. In the lines below he talks about the irony of four generations, from his grandfather to his son, being linked by silence, solitude, and ultimately separation: The separate life let you survive, while perhaps The only one you left wept in the blur of your heart. Now in a night of sleep and taunting rain My son and I speak of that famine nameless as stone. A conscience of years is between us. He is young. The whirls of glory are breaking down for him before me. Does he think of the past as a loss we have lived, our own? Out of silence we look back now at what we do not know.
It is this same double-edged sense of alienation and connection that he feels when he watched the Hindu rituals and customs, which could have been his own, but for his grandsire's act of conversion. In a temple, he dares not go "into the dark, dank sanctum/ where the myth shifts/ swiftly from hand to hand, eye to eye." And, his fear of the distance between him and his past is culminated in the final question asked to him by a bearded, saffron robed man: "Are you a Hindu?".
An age-old predicament of identity thus haunts Mahapatra, and makes him pose questions to what is called reality. He waits for something to come to him, something meaningful, something real and staying, beyond the fleeting images: the children at play who "belong somewhere else", geckos chuckling on the walls, mushrooms sprouting on the damp earth... He wonders if what he waits for is like "a lie of living" that comes when he is asleep. Thus torn by the vision of the inaccessible 'real', he feels that life is a silence into which even the old song gets lost. At a point when he feels, "my life is something else," all outer objects seek entry into Mahapatra's inner space where opposites are evoked simultaneously. At such a moment of absolute freedom, Mahapatra's poetry asks its reader to breathe it in, rather than fruitlessly attempting to interpret it. Words turn into images; images into symbols. Then, if it is given time, each symbol opens itself to reveal to the reader the possibility of a true world, a world of love: So through this door, through the gleaming skin of the three kingdoms, the mineral, vegetable and animal, to experience the fever of love and the deeper undulation of the earth.
Mahapatra's desire for a renewal of his relationships is evident, but he hopes to achieve it through patience, rather than through a leap. He keeps vigil; he listens carefully. His poems thus become lessons in waiting for the "freedom of the body when it is alone. The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal, the beds of the streams of the sleeping god." This precious volume gathers together the best of Jayanta Mahapatra under five sections that make and remake the world by means of a genuine creative instinct that allows for nothing less than dreams in order to find the 'real', for, "only when you dream, reality beings."
