Teesta Review: A Journal of
Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November
2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
The pilgrimage: A cross
cultural discourse between Bishnupada Ray and Dominic Symes
-- Bishnupada Ray and Dominic Symes
Editorial Note:
For this
collaboration, each poet initially sent three poems to the other, after which
they wrote new poems responding to those received. This article presents the
initial poems, followed by the responses, followed by reflective commentaries
in which each poet discusses their experiences of and learning through this
creative and dialogic process.
The work
presented here redevelops materials previously published in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses
special issue number 60 (https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/23520-sites-and-citations). The previously-published work has been
reconsidered and reframed in the light of more recent social, political, and
historical developments, particularly those related to the ongoing impact of
COVID-19 and the global climate crisis.
Poem by Bisnhupada Ray, number one:
‘Rite of Passage’
Note: This poem was written after visiting
Ahalyasthan and Gautam Kund, 25 kms North of Darbhanga Town in North Bihar,
during the religious festival of Dusshera 2012. Ahalyasthan is a place that has
significance in Hinduism, because of the story of the sage Rishi Gautam and his
wife Ahalya. The story states that while Gautam was away, Indra – the god of rain and the heavens
– seduced
Ahalya and had intercourse with her. Gautam later caught them in the act, which
led him to curse both of them. As a result Indra’s penis fell off and Ahalya
was turned to stone, until the seventh avatar of the supreme deity Vishnu -Ram-
released her from her curse. Ahalya was then redeemed and reunited with her
husband.
this stony mythological passage
to the violation of the earth
is surrounded by extreme
hardships
the earth has stopped yielding
the crops of our survival
life is at a precarious edge
hanging loose in a seeming
balance
possibly waiting for the
footstep
that may bring redemption
to the wretched of the earth
but the earth bears with
equanimity
our lustful sins
and the ascetic denials
there is no lifestyle edition
here
no structure of brick and glass
no communal architecture
but pensive eyes
and the philosophy of the
ephemeral
the visitor does not feel at
home
his masked feeling betrays all
there is no motorable road in
sight
to lead him straight to his
pilgrimage
but a silhouette of the road
that might have existed some
time
like a wife-beaten broken man
my car groans under the burden
creaking growling but just
holding
the line of sanity
through the violent push-ups
breaking down with premature
orgasm
to go limp and flaccid
the hope that the passage will
get better
after this endless extremity
keeps us going.
Poem by
Bisnhupada Ray, number two: ‘Pret Shila’ (The Stone for the Spirits yet to
Attain Liberation), Gaya, Bihar, Dusshera 2012
the steep flight of steps on
this ancient hill
forbade us to climb
yet the name was powerful
enough
to draw us to the top
undaunted
we started climbing
the countless steps
on the way up we took frequent
rests
exhausted and bitter
with beggars and priests
for not giving us any chance to
think
by their constant nagging
demands
and pestering
yet they kept the hill alive
and made the stones dramatic
showing the way how to persuade
people to believe
without them it would have been
just a stone and a hill
and no story to be told
from the past to the present
but beware!
all the legends’ spirits,
beggars, lepers
may vanish unceremoniously
because overlooking the hill
in the distance
there comes Loyola.
Poem by
Bisnhupada Ray, number three: Festival of Light, Siliguri, West Bengal, Kalipuja 2012
when the town wore light
and towered over the night
over the darkened water of
Mahananda
the illusion of light
appeared to me like unending
waves
of eternity towards the skyline
then we plunged into the
darkness
of villages and canal road and
forests
and drove to the banks of river
Teesta
where an idol of goddess Kali
was awaiting
the late-night awakening and
blood sacrifice
the poorest of the poor kept a
lighted vigil
the sky also kept a vigil with
starry lamps
and the darkness appeared
defeated
when we drove back to the town,
a dark cat crossed my path
then jumped into darkness
behind
each wave of light started to
break
on the even level of darkness.
Poem by Dominic Symes, number one: ‘Arriving
in Gaeta’
“The Mediterranean, at least—the Atlantic is brown—is always just white,
white, white.” — Cy Twombly
Shifting landscape blurs days,
Still jet lagged Wednesday eyes half
Closed the doors I can’t stamp the date
The way we have our tickets
Tracks tapping out an exact rhythm
Low in the sky the sun you are
Asleep on my shoulder your late afternoon
Thoughts wound down &
Sync ourselves to the slow circularity
Like a surging wave of language that
Book spine down on your lap,
You duck beneath your head
Bobbing with each contour
of the coastline & feeling
The words speeding through me,
Half asleep to the sound of the waves
Last night re-reading his quote,
Re: the Mediterranean considered
As white (all white) a white out of
White washing the field of vision,
Peeling words off the page my eyes
Lift up to the window in that moment
Waiting to adjust to the dazzling
Horizon without marking features
Blinding how a life might look in a flash
A brief pause between acts
Tranquillity followed by a sense of
Action—I must do something do I
Wake you reach across you for the camera
inside the lens inside this carriage this
Memory I am having again (his)
Moving through it unable to capture the absence,
I let you keep sleeping let your thoughts
Alone but my phone I sneak from my pocket
A photograph,
A memory trailing like a cloud of smoke
I have it now inherited this memory
To share with you upon waking
Poem by Dominic Symes, number two: ‘Hymn to Possibility (Shelley)’
On the balcony,
Looking out onto a life not lived
Both ancient & immediate
The sea breeze rolls through
Up here the air
Thins out like greying hair
Whispers of it
Whipping into his face
Sun bronzed but
Nonetheless delicate
Young and bookish
His life book-
Ending here,
On the promontory
Of a premonition,
Children swept
Away by the ocean,
Swelling with constant
Distemper,
Tossing them
Upon the rocky cove
As he is sitting in silence
Isolated on this balcony
The last of the amber light
Washing back out to the horizon
His wish is to say again
The name of this place
So that it might not vanish
Like his appetite
Like the light
Shifting in his seat
Exile is as vast as the view
That stretches out before him
Remaining as intimate as a child
Not yet named
Places people
Are words only
Rolling over in his mouth
Each untied to the last
What is it that holds the world
Together in its innermost folds?
Of course there is writing
& there is dying too
But if there is writing & not dying
Perhaps there is
Writing & living forever
Poem by Dominic Symes, number three: ‘Hymn to Possibility (Twombly)’
On the balcony,
Struck by the quiet
Of this almost ageless
Moment up here
With the sea birds,
Holding their pitch
Against the breeze
Effortless
Flags of surrender,
Tilt to fill the
Empty pockets of time,
From the zig zag
Of a switchback road,
I see myself tracing
These same streets,
Hadrian might have
& might again
A broad brush,
Capturing the town’s
Coarse delicacy
It’s not photography,
Or aerial views,
But a gauge of
that vague electrical
Hum that once
Fired off,
Filament after filament
Like a switchboard
Lighting up
Inspiration washes in
Like waves of sudden light
At the instruction
Of the moon
Perhaps there is painting
& living forever
Responding poem by Bishnupada
Ray, number one: ‘Prick: Visiting
Sitamarhi, the Point where Sita Entered the Earth’
Note: Sita is an incarnate of Vishnu’s wife Lakshimi, the goddess of
wealth and prosperity, who is the wife of Ram; the incarnate of her husband.
in that enchanted grotto temple
of wish making
I wished to see a fairy queen
who was the true child of mother earth
and who dared to face the quicksand of life
and entered the earth
creation needs a prick
a point where one can see the abyss
and know the mysteries of being
the prime attraction of evil
also deflects evil from the path
to be traversed not without pain
I do not want to see more
seeing more may fill me with anger
all the advantage is lost
in the tortuous path of morality
limited vision spoils the good intention
true vision needs self-wisdom
people just increase the confusion
the source of vanity is destroyed
as a curse of the evil eye
with the loss of a thing
the forward path suddenly ends
life on earth
becomes an eternity of regret
of acts done
and the wish they were not done
that whoring attitude pained me
pricked me into the act of creation
in public eye she remained impeccable
but I secretly knew what she was
she deflected evil from my path
but effaced me from the public eye
and put me under erasure.
Responding
poem by Bishnupada Ray, number two: ‘Purpose’
(after visting Lord Shiva Jyotirlingas
in Madhya Pradesh, especially Omkareshwar and Mahakaleshwar)
the
offseason swarms of bees
sting
with anarchist philosophy
so that I
may lose
appetite
and desire
or even
fear
to jump
over the precipice
let’s hear
the ringing bells
the
desperate attempts
to
harness spiritual energy
that may
stretch the soul
beyond
hunger and disease
and
multitudes of earthly challenges
and
evaporate the shame of the body
I can see
the solitary mad
making
pilgrimage
through
dark nights
and
thronging with others
at the
narrow temple doors
to have a
glimpse
of the
self-created ancient light
through
the barricade
of the
conceited priests
the
bloated maggots
of god’s
strange playground
but some
priests
play lord
Shiva’s eternal music
with the
gusto of prophecy
their
flowing hair
and the
sweaty muscles
are like
the divine rhythm
of lord
Shiva’s insight
into time
and being
this
music is a cry
from the
depths
a moan
from the churning
a purpose
the
divine art and passion
for
creation
in a
crescendo of orgasm.
Responding
poem by Bishnupada Ray, number three: ‘Mystic
River’ (after
visiting Vrindavan and Mathura)
that
melody of the flute
churns
the soul with the sadness
of
meditation
seems
someone is crying
the cry
echoes through
every nook
and corner
of
Vrindavan and Mathura
and
reverberates through
the
distant city of Dwarka
the cry
still persists
through
all the places
where he
keeps a temple
for it is
lord Krishna who is crying
in spite
of the love of many women
his heart
still cries for Radha
the dream
of a bud about to blossom
amidst
the mortal imperfection
the
yearning of a mystic river
he felt
flowing in his blood
and the
Rubicon he crossed
for a
heaven he knew
as one
and the only one.
Responding poem by Dominic
Symes, number one: ‘Black Mirror (invasion)’
When I put it all together
In my poem,
It preaches accuracy,
Not consistency
What is that anachronism,
Lost in the temper of the times
Tazzy-devilling around the
room,
Eyes darting across
The effaced surface,
Where bigger pricks
Lack the requisite compensation
Show them
What they’re playing for
tonight,
What has been here before
Shows through,
Like a cyclone tracing
Winds, feeding into memories
Looking and not seeing,
You remember hiding
In the bathroom
For it to pass over,
These are screen memories
Words and images given to you,
Suggesting the potential for
More accurate narratives
Site of the exhibition
shifting,
Like opinions in a kangaroo
court
They pivot and perform,
Topsoil removed is here
arranged,
Sand parses hands for a
photograph
Forsaking what is left
Monies exchanged,
Everything arranged
Legacies erased,
You are my
Black mirror
Responding poem by Dominic
Symes, number two: ‘Black Mirror (aversion)’
Black mirror,
I am yours
As a final thought,
Before switching from
Do not disturb
To flight mode
Trying to focus,
To run the clock down
I will catch you up later,
Half-awake I poke around
the garden we share
Moon-baking we see
A rip in the black
Skin of the dream,
Half-obscured by rumour
& rhetoric
Shifting across it,
To be outside of myself
Outside & by myself
Each word I utter comes back,
Arching its spine to memory’s
Empty palace
Beginning in a gallery,
Dampening the sound
This mute black canvas
Its pin-prick stars
Retracing steps,
Trying to unthread myself
From my complicity
I arrive at the dead centre,
When I put it all together
Responding
poem by Dominic Symes, number three: ‘Love in a Warm Climate’
I’ve
exhausted every natural resource
All my coal for burning
excoriated & extolled
Out of
breath,
from
being shipped offshore
Exporting it & me & you & us
What is
left?
Our empty apartment
its exquisite taps & kitsch appliances
How
small in the grand scheme
of
asthmatic capitalistic growth
seem our two minute showers?
Or
rinsing out our jars before recycling them?
Your little post-it notes?
All those generous second
helpings?
Basically,
How you let me gorge myself
On your passive income
&
your generosity
Never
emptying the carton of milk,
In case
I needed even more time
To
torture myself
Dreaming up a remedy for
the
supply chains that bind us all
I am
consciously uncoupling myself
From
these severe demands
Like a
lever longing to be released,
Or a
ladybug crushed
By a
too-eager thumb
It’s
bits of coastline,
Crumbling into skyline
How the
lights stay on all day,
In the
houses we can’t afford to own
Where do we go?
Homeless,
This
world is no longer a safe place to live.
Reflection
by Dominic Symes:
When I was asked to
be part of this collaboration, I began by writing a list of all of the links
that I could draw between my experience and those of a poet living and working
in India. I was excited to read Bishnu’s work, because my list of potential
overlaps was quite small. Reading the first three poems that appear in this
paper, I felt a shared appreciation for landscape and the mythological
implications of a given place, having completed my own aesthetic ‘pilgrimage’
to the place where painter Cy Twombly lived and worked in Italy, as part of my
recently completed thesis. Given how much my own writing owes to the tradition
of O’Hara’s “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems, I admired the intimacy in Bishnu’s
poetic pilgrimages; as I felt this was an effective way to cope with the
baggage of the potentially mythological (Perloff 22). Goethe talks about the
“literary soil” that he experienced by the Mediterranean, rich with ancient
history; seeing the worlds that he had only read about in books come to life in
front of him during his pilgrimage, as captured in his travel journal Italian
Journey (1786) (Jacobus 136).
Certainly, I was
influenced by Twombly’s ability to combine textual and geographical lineage in
his paintings. His own work traced the Ancient Greeks and Romans, through the
Romantic authors on Grand Tours, along with contemporary poets and artists who
had all shared the same stretch of coastline. Considering location and
perspective as a concern shared by poets and painters, the two Hymns to
Possibility imagine PB Shelley and Twombly looking out from the same
balcony centuries apart. This approach treats both painting and poetry as the
“product of the creative act that produced it” (Ashbery ix), placing emphasis
on the location the work was made and how the artists were responding to the
world around them in a particular moment. By being in the place where Twombly
lived, I was hoping to summon some of these influences in my own work to create
poetry that was ekphrastic, but which responded to the act of production as the
critical feature in the poem, rather than the surface of the painting.
Another
ekphrastic-based approach that I used was to write in response to an
exhibition, rather than directly in response to one work of art. The two Black
Mirror poems are influenced by the palate and technique of Kudjla/Gangalu
artist Daniel Boyd in Untitled (CM) (2016). However, they primarily
treat this work as an entry point for engagement with the themes of the
exhibition “Defying Empire” where the work was hung. Like Bishnu’s poems in
Section Two, these Black Mirror poems trace a surface and narrate the
experience of this examination in time. Boyd’s painting is a large black
canvas with a lacquered surface, punctured by holes, as if demonstrating a
struggle and its lasting impact. The title offers two different lenses
through which to interrogate culture in this moment: at the zenith of digital
technology, the “black mirrors” that are our smartphones and the post-colonial
legacy of white invasion, using the “black mirror” as a device to critique the
foundations of a white Australia.
As Bishnu’s poetry
suggests, the poet is called upon to offer resistance and to stand
in defiance of pervading cultural narratives. Love in a Warm
Climate addresses the climate emergency and the shared blame that falls
upon Indians and Australians for their complicity. In Australia, we physically
cut into the earth, leaving scars kilometres long and hundreds of metres deep,
in order to extract material that can be shipped to India to
generate electricity. Like Bishnu, I am trying to contrast the actions of
individuals in the intimate sphere against the enormity of the crisis, reaching
the conclusion that perhaps what binds us both is the Earth itself, which is
increasingly becoming uninhabitable.
Corresponding with
Bishnu via email and reading his work, I came to appreciate the vast
differences between our experiences, both in the poetic influences that we drew
upon and the legacy that colonialism has left upon us. I found that whilst his
pilgrimage was about recovery of his own heritage on his own land, my
pilgrimage was to Europe; where my family came from only a generation ago to
recover some of what I thought might have been my own cultural and aesthetic
inheritance. However, while the poems I initially sent Bishnu about pilgrimage
and inheritance were written about a period in 2016, his influence certainly
drew me back to Australia. As a result, these more recent response poems are
centred around this land and the issues that affect its citizens in this
moment. The dispossession of Indigenous land by European invaders is a pressing
concern and one that artists in this country have been addressing for many
years. My experience at the “Defying Empire” exhibition provided inroads to
this subject whilst still allowing me to work with the ekphrastic poem as a
mode of engagement.
Love in a Warm
Climate was a response to the confidence Bishnu’s poetry has in confronting
universal, metaphysical concepts; “divine peace” and “self-wisdom”, trekking
“the torturous path of morality”. It returns me to the list that I wrote at the
beginning of our collaboration of things we might have in common. I had written
“universal things: love, money, books, climate emergency” and then “specific
things: we send them our coal.”
Reflection by Bishnupada Ray
In spite of its shrinking domain, the
enduring appeal of poetry to the sensitive perhaps lies in its spirit of quest,
a sense of pilgrimage that crosses the boundary of the finite. It does so by
means of engaging with existential angst and then transcending it by way of a
movement from evil to goodness. In this sense poetry of place is poetry of
post-contamination, for in the Indian context, a place comes with a sense of
always already contaminated; its value and meaning compromised and rediscovered
by an irreversible postcolonial experience. Geographical imagination provides
an important insight into the nature of human domination and
oppression. The influence of the place on the artistic imagination is
hardly romantic. A place, like an insulted creature, evokes and invokes
self-criticism. The response of the poet, when he makes a pilgrimage through an
invisibly-marked bruised landscape, is to discover the sense of displacement,
the subtle alteration of the very being that gives us identity, to discover the
residue of whatever there was originally, however wrong or bad. A place becomes
a locus of domination and marginalization. It becomes a battleground, in the
way the soul becomes a battleground between good and evil. The warring forces
are felt as the poet, persona or observer becomes fused with the landscape. One
thematic aspect of Indianness is the internalisation of colonialism and
resistance to it, rather than the external; the cultural markers are always
found in the form of our attitude towards the womankind, the subaltern, and our
sense of hopelessness and guilt.
It is a privilege of the poet to stand
at the equinoctial point between culture and nature, the centre and the margin,
and to reassess the wholeness that forms lifeworld of a particular space and
time, to give expression to the moments when humanity might have gone wrong.
Perhaps it is the duty of the poet to preserve the humanity that preserves the
bond between culture and nature, which man cannot sustain in the face of
progress and history.
It is in this sphere of love for
humanity and the earth, and to gather insights into their sustenance in face of
our precarious history, that pilgrimage assumes a special significance.
Pilgrimage takes us from the centre to the margin of existence, from the
mainstream of the present time to an almost vanishing past, a vanishing world
only preserved by the places of the past, some of the places are mentioned in
the poems of both the poets, and these places are the occasions of the poems
selected in this project of cultural exchange. The mythic heritage and fame of
the places mentioned in my poems are culturally invaluable, for sustaining
modernity through tradition. For a nation with a history of subjugation,
pilgrimage is a mode of recovery and rediscovery of one’s own sense of
belonging and displacement, to be at home and also the sense of homelessness.
This insight may offer a direction not only towards preservation of smaller and
marginal cultures, but also towards mitigating the effects of climate change
and other global issues arising out of human short-sightedness and mercenary
motives, endangering humanity and the earth equally.
In my initial poems, humanity and place
share the bond of incompleteness and uncertainty, and evoke a sense of vague
yearning of something missing, or which should have been there. The poems
express an unsettling sense of ironic discord, some lack, or some poverty that
motivates pilgrimage, in order to complete the arc of existence. Life is
inseparably conditioned by the intertwining of physical and the spiritual. In
his initial poems, Dom outlines a pilgrimage of an aesthetic sort; visiting the
place where the artist Cy Twombly lived to discover ‘Twombly’s ability to
combine textual and geographical lineage in his paintings’, and his poems encounter
the tension between what is visible on the surface of the canvas and the actual
reality. In his responding poems, Dom recreates the original pilgrimage to
‘recover some of what I thought might have been my own cultural and aesthetic
inheritance’ and aptly takes up the progress of technology that provides him
the metaphor of “black mirror” ‘as a device to critique the foundations of a
white Australia’. In my responding poems, the topography is slightly tipped
towards resolving the spiritual questionings of the soul. An effort is made to
describe such a situation in these poems, by juxtaposing the abstract with the
concrete.
Thus from the
perspective of cross-cultural exchange and response, this poetic exchange
between Dominic Symes and me at once solidifies and makes fluid the
geographical conditions in which different cultures thrive and accommodate one
another. For me the influence of a place ranges from postcolonial to
psychological — to a state of existential post-contamination, in which the sense
of belonging is inescapably mired in trauma and evil expressed in the way of
pilgrimage and mythology; for Dominic Symes the influence of a place is
captured as a pilgrimage of a more artistic sort. The canvas’ rendering of a
place is both matched and mitigated, going back in time and place to distil its
essence from the moments of present reality. The ekphrastic quality of Dom’s
poems enables us to see the intertextual nature of our perception of reality,
how the abstract impinges upon the perception of the concrete and vice versa.
For both me and Symes, the privilege of the artist lies in standing at the
equinoctial point between culture and nature (as represented by a place) in
order to transcend the evil or a scar or an inexplicable lack, to something holistic
and healing, like the sense of homecoming and being at home, in the midst of
the pain of homelessness.
List of works cited:
Ashbery,
John(1971). ‘Introduction’ The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited
by Donald Allen, Alfred A. Knopf.
Boyd, Daniel(2016).Untitled
(CM)‘Defying Empire’: 3rd National Indigenous Arts Triennial,
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Jacobus, Mary
(2016).Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint. Princeton UP.
Perloff,
Marjorie (1977).Frank O'Hara: Poet Amongst Painters. George Braziller.
General
Reading:
Chaturvedi,
V. (Ed). (2015). Mapping Subaltern
Studies and the Postcolonial. Rawat Publications.
Desai, G. and
Nair, S. (Eds). (2005). Postcolonialisms:
An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. Berg.
Sharp, J.P.
(2009).Geographies of Postcolonialism:
Spaces of Power and Representation. Sage Publications.