Artikel
Homecomings
7 juni 2006
‘Sutta Nipata’
Memories have to do with the belief that one may own one’s own home but actually unlike the snail, we carry our homes within us which enables us to fly or to stay to enjoy each. But beware of that which is breathtakingly beautiful.
A year from Monday by John Cage
What drives one to leave home, to let go of the received life-world, to cross boundaries, to jaywalk, to give up on metaphors that gave one a name, a community, a form of life, an identity?
Vinoba (Bhave) left home at the age of twenty to find a truth other than the one he was born into. He never went back. James Joyce left Dublin with memories of early childhood to write the universal history of twentieth century man. He could not find a home in the twenty-two addresses of Paris. And he wrote, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the hearts of all the cities of the world.” Saraswatichandra, the protagonist of the first major Gujarati novel, began his search for self as a homeless wanderer.
What is it that drives one to be modern? Lyotard, the pope of the post-modern, writes, “Modernity, whenever it appears, does occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality, a discovery linked to the invention of other realities.”
Perhaps modernity is as much an experience of willing exiles as forced émigrés, as much an attempt at reaching out as the experience of being uprooted. Modern literature, from the world over, reflects the complexity and richness of this experience.
I did not leave the chawl in Kalbadevi, the commercial centre of Bombay, until I was twenty. The paperbacks from Strand bookstall were enough for some of us to imagine that we were conversing with Godard at Café de Fleur and endorsing Breton’s pronouncement: “‘Change the world’, said Marx. ‘Transform life’, said Rimbaud. They are one and the same to us.” We were intoxicated by imaginary homelands.
But to leave home is not necessarily the same as to renounce the language one was born into. Vinoba, the pada-yatri, forever leaving home, carried with him the entire oral tradition, weaving it skilfully into the post-modern mantra, “Act locally, think globally.” Joyce, the arch avant-garde-ist, wrote as if he was writing in many languages simultaneously, while Beckett gave up writing in English, the language that had bound him to Dublin and Joyce, ultimately reducing the language of his art to minimal gestures that spoke universally, and yet they were always Irish enough! Some of us wrote a kind of Gujarati that was always on the edge of disintegration ….
Some of us, in our journeys were touched by a sant-parampara of another kind. “How to be a saint without believing in God, that is the question.” Saint Camus, Saint Kabir, and so on. It all got tangled up in our samskaras and we began to experience and experiment with the making of the self – Vinoba and Joyce constantly converging on our routes.
Perhaps, leaving home is another way of enlarging one’s language, achieving a desperate, yet an intimate distance from it, a form of interrogation. My years in America in search of another kind of truth, almost as if seeking another body, were as much an act of undergoing as of overcoming. “As being a bridge over an abyss, a dangerous across, a dangerous on the way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.”
What is it that compels one to return home: is it nostalgia or fatigue, or the politics of power that operate wherever one goes?
What kind of home is it that one returns to? And with what baggage of stories and landscapes and wounds? To what does one return? And to whom does one speak? To all those who never left and are more than glad to see that you have returned, so they can instruct you, scold you, measure you? So they can demand the repentance of an outcast from you? Condemn you at their whim, and punish you when they wish?
What is it that makes us challenge modernity? Is not the challenging itself the act of a modernist – one who suspects everything that is received even if it is only a day old?
If modernism is an act of renouncing what is given, and post-modernism is an act of recovering what is renounced, is it not that between these two acts, the given has been reinvented, relocated and rearranged? And is it no longer the same?
I did not expect a grand welcome. I am not sure that there would be anyone there to receive us. But we were certainly rich enough to receive and embrace all that was left behind, except that it had become even more enigmatic than before.
The least that homecoming implies, is the letting be of Marquez and Mehta, Tukaram and Tarkovsky, within the same present moment.
Let me also confess that none of this is easy and requires, perhaps, more than a lifetime to be realised.
I would like to end with another poem by a Russian poet of the thirties.
Don’t tempt yourself with foreign languages – try to forget themafter all, you won’t be able to bite through glass with your teeth.O, how tormenting is the flight of a strange bird’s scream,you pay a harsh penalty for illicit pleasures.At the final parting a foreign name will not saveThe dying body and the thinking eternal mouthWhat if Aristo and Tasso, who enchant us, who enchant us,are monsters with blue brains and scaly wet eyes?In punishment for your arrogance, you incorrigible lover of sounds,you’ll receive the sponge soaked in vinegar for your treacherous lips.
‘The Moscow Notebooks’ (Osip Mandelstam)
Unpublished, 1996
Notes:
* Vinoba Bhave: Indian freedom fighter, ardent Gandhian, visionary and scholar, whose Bhoodan (Gift of Land) movement, started on April 18, 1951, attracted world attention.
* Pada-yatri: pilgrim who travels by foot
* Sant-parampara: the tradition of the ‘poet saints’ that originated in the 14th century in northern and central India.
* Samskaras: tendencies or propensities inherited from previous births; also the purification rites to be performed by a Hindu during rites of passage.
In this previously unpublished essay, a ruminative and elliptical prose poem in its own right, Prabodh Parikh reflects on the blurred divide between the “willing exile and forced émigré”, jaywalker and pada-yatri. He also explores the perennial quest for imaginary homelands.
If you cannot get an appropriately learned friend to travel with you,Travel alone like a rhinoceros just as a king abandons a defeated nation.‘Sutta Nipata’
Memories have to do with the belief that one may own one’s own home but actually unlike the snail, we carry our homes within us which enables us to fly or to stay to enjoy each. But beware of that which is breathtakingly beautiful.
A year from Monday by John Cage
What drives one to leave home, to let go of the received life-world, to cross boundaries, to jaywalk, to give up on metaphors that gave one a name, a community, a form of life, an identity?
Vinoba (Bhave) left home at the age of twenty to find a truth other than the one he was born into. He never went back. James Joyce left Dublin with memories of early childhood to write the universal history of twentieth century man. He could not find a home in the twenty-two addresses of Paris. And he wrote, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the hearts of all the cities of the world.” Saraswatichandra, the protagonist of the first major Gujarati novel, began his search for self as a homeless wanderer.
What is it that drives one to be modern? Lyotard, the pope of the post-modern, writes, “Modernity, whenever it appears, does occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality, a discovery linked to the invention of other realities.”
Perhaps modernity is as much an experience of willing exiles as forced émigrés, as much an attempt at reaching out as the experience of being uprooted. Modern literature, from the world over, reflects the complexity and richness of this experience.
I did not leave the chawl in Kalbadevi, the commercial centre of Bombay, until I was twenty. The paperbacks from Strand bookstall were enough for some of us to imagine that we were conversing with Godard at Café de Fleur and endorsing Breton’s pronouncement: “‘Change the world’, said Marx. ‘Transform life’, said Rimbaud. They are one and the same to us.” We were intoxicated by imaginary homelands.
But to leave home is not necessarily the same as to renounce the language one was born into. Vinoba, the pada-yatri, forever leaving home, carried with him the entire oral tradition, weaving it skilfully into the post-modern mantra, “Act locally, think globally.” Joyce, the arch avant-garde-ist, wrote as if he was writing in many languages simultaneously, while Beckett gave up writing in English, the language that had bound him to Dublin and Joyce, ultimately reducing the language of his art to minimal gestures that spoke universally, and yet they were always Irish enough! Some of us wrote a kind of Gujarati that was always on the edge of disintegration ….
Some of us, in our journeys were touched by a sant-parampara of another kind. “How to be a saint without believing in God, that is the question.” Saint Camus, Saint Kabir, and so on. It all got tangled up in our samskaras and we began to experience and experiment with the making of the self – Vinoba and Joyce constantly converging on our routes.
Perhaps, leaving home is another way of enlarging one’s language, achieving a desperate, yet an intimate distance from it, a form of interrogation. My years in America in search of another kind of truth, almost as if seeking another body, were as much an act of undergoing as of overcoming. “As being a bridge over an abyss, a dangerous across, a dangerous on the way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.”
What is it that compels one to return home: is it nostalgia or fatigue, or the politics of power that operate wherever one goes?
What kind of home is it that one returns to? And with what baggage of stories and landscapes and wounds? To what does one return? And to whom does one speak? To all those who never left and are more than glad to see that you have returned, so they can instruct you, scold you, measure you? So they can demand the repentance of an outcast from you? Condemn you at their whim, and punish you when they wish?
What is it that makes us challenge modernity? Is not the challenging itself the act of a modernist – one who suspects everything that is received even if it is only a day old?
If modernism is an act of renouncing what is given, and post-modernism is an act of recovering what is renounced, is it not that between these two acts, the given has been reinvented, relocated and rearranged? And is it no longer the same?
I did not expect a grand welcome. I am not sure that there would be anyone there to receive us. But we were certainly rich enough to receive and embrace all that was left behind, except that it had become even more enigmatic than before.
The least that homecoming implies, is the letting be of Marquez and Mehta, Tukaram and Tarkovsky, within the same present moment.
Our poetry now is the realisation that we possess
Nothing Anything therefore
is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus
need not fear its loss. We need not destroy the past;
it is gone. At any moment it might reappear and seem to be and
and be the present.
(A year from Monday by John Cage)
Let me also confess that none of this is easy and requires, perhaps, more than a lifetime to be realised.
I would like to end with another poem by a Russian poet of the thirties.
Don’t tempt yourself with foreign languages – try to forget themafter all, you won’t be able to bite through glass with your teeth.O, how tormenting is the flight of a strange bird’s scream,you pay a harsh penalty for illicit pleasures.At the final parting a foreign name will not saveThe dying body and the thinking eternal mouthWhat if Aristo and Tasso, who enchant us, who enchant us,are monsters with blue brains and scaly wet eyes?In punishment for your arrogance, you incorrigible lover of sounds,you’ll receive the sponge soaked in vinegar for your treacherous lips.
‘The Moscow Notebooks’ (Osip Mandelstam)
Unpublished, 1996
Notes:
* Vinoba Bhave: Indian freedom fighter, ardent Gandhian, visionary and scholar, whose Bhoodan (Gift of Land) movement, started on April 18, 1951, attracted world attention.
* Pada-yatri: pilgrim who travels by foot
* Sant-parampara: the tradition of the ‘poet saints’ that originated in the 14th century in northern and central India.
* Samskaras: tendencies or propensities inherited from previous births; also the purification rites to be performed by a Hindu during rites of passage.
© Pradodh Parikh
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