Pallav
Ranjan’s new Love Poem,
“Fire and Ashes” is a composition of inversions. There are, of course,
inversions to be found within the rhythms and constructions of the
words. These have, as is the nature of poetry at its best, the power
to grip us, move us, carry us along, and finally stop us, from time
to time, with the temporal punctuation of music.
In
“Fire and Ashes”, however, one finds a set of existential inversions,
equally striking, within its network of emotions and ideas. We find
a poet who wants to speak:
“I want you to say
my words never tire you…”
yet
who promises to be silent:
“Well how about this?
I’ll hide my feelings.”
Within
the anxious context of love, of pleasing his beloved, we find a
man who, in fact, cannot decide whether his presence or absence
is most advantageous in his world. It is a deep basic rift between
belief and disbelief in the value of the self, a rift which, at
time, follows us all in our own nightmares.
Can
you love me? Can I believe you will love me if I am only myself?
Can I believe you will love me if I am all of myself? These are
our earliest questions and our most profound.
In
“Fire and Ashes”, Ranjan seeks resolution to this dilemma alternately
through the peace of withdrawal:
“Let
me be non-existent.
Then
there would be no one.
No
me,
no
you,
nothing.”
and
through the determined emergence of the self:
“I,
too,
shuffle
and scrape my feet…
in
case you should want to hear
my
own weak music.”
The
vehicle of this struggle, “Fire and Ashes”, is the poignant self-portrait
of a man whose inner life is energetic and passionate
“I tonight feel
that
I must shriek
so
the whole earth shivers”
but
who regularly stubs his all-to-human toes against the more mundane
realities with which most of us live,
“But that, I suppose,
would be disturbing
to you, me, and the neighbors.”
The
frustrating aspect of this portrait, is how often Ranjan snatches
away his own pleasures and little victories. He wishes he could
be silent for his lover (is that what she really wants?), and then
finds his own silence boring; he allows himself to believe that
he may be pleasing, and then limits even his own wish
“I
want you to say
my
company is not unpleasant
(though
there are limits),
I
want you to say
You
want me forever
(you
cannot really say that, can you)”
in
a sort of modern oblomovism. The result of these painful encounters
is a bristly, pungent, lonely and touchingly hopeful inquiry. One
is reminded of a small child, covered with play-dirt and scratches,
breathless before his mother with a treasured bug. Will you, can
you love me? Can I, will I have you?
To
the Western reader, the tone and style of this new work is reminiscent
of Jacques Prevert’s “Paroles” and William Carlos William’s “Asphodel”.
Our writer is a populist, not an elitist. He reveals himself to
us as he might see himself in the mirror, flawed, wishful, worried,
and persistent. |