The Poetry of Laxmi Narayan Mahapatra

 

P. ASIT KUMAR

 

            I maintain the thesis that no serious poet can ignore any of the problems of his relation to others and the world which appear as configurations in his consciousness. This logically entails that all serious poetry in some way tackles these problems of relationship, though none so far can claim to have resolved them once for all. Any in-depth probe into the tangled skein of experience has an aura of metaphysics of existential pattern, not of any particular brand, but rather of a very generic nature in its explorations of the selfhood. The search for selfhood begins when the poet starts to negate his apparent identity as a social man. An artist is more isolated in his domain of creativity with his own experience as stuff and his own self as the companion than a common man who rarely feels any desire to get beyond his social identity. Therefore, I believe that negation of social self or in Freudian signification, the rejection of super ego and the search for selfhood are interconnected in any empirical guest for the real beyond the veil of the appearance.

 

            Mr. Mahapatra is mainly a philosopher-poet though often his poetry seems to be the rapturous flow of emotion churning in the depth of his being as a result of some rupture sustained by him in his relationship with the world. He is hurt into poetry, to quote Auden’s remarks on Yeats’ Ireland hurt him into poetry. But in his case neither problems of state nor ruptures in family, nor unrequited love seems to be the catalytic agent for his poetic effusions. Much of his early verse appears to be a multichromatic representation of his acute questionings about the nature of existence. Often we find a sense of ontological insecurity haunting his melodious lines as a plaintive note of one who has already met with all-annihilating death in some form or other.

 

            To be aware of death is to get conscious about the fragility of man as body, a stark physicality amounting to a status as a thing among things. Death is not given as a datum in the total nexus of one’s experience: it can only be sensed in some features of dead things, either a corpse on a dead bird, death as negation of life in others, but not as an integral part of one’s self-awareness. But the nature of human awareness is such, that even self-­awareness needs to depend on man’s being conscious of what is other than self; and the conversion comes easy for the poet who can transpose himself into others or implant the others in his soil of experience. The result of such an imaginative construction is felt to be the negation of life. His poetry abounds with such negations.

 

            Of all negations that existentialists have often been concerned with “death” is the ultimate one, perhaps the only fact that negates all facts that compose the phenomena of being as a series of consciousness, each unit being created out of negation of the previous state. Let us examine a few death experiences he strives to depict in their existential implications. For an existentialist “death” is not simply a fact among facts, but a chasm that separates being from being positing nothingness between two states of the same consciousness.

 

            buffeted by the treacherous wind

            hangs my stupefied body

            and my entity gets lost

            in the cryptic moonlights’

            kaleidoscopic dream-garment

                                                                        (Rta. P. 9)

 

            The loss of entity is the integral part of the series of negations culminating in death, and the anguish is such a situation is directed at oneself such as a body separated from consciousness. The body hangs stupefied buffeted by a treacherous wind and the moonlight weaves a dream-garment around this bodily aware­ness. The wind and the moonlight belong where the body belongs and identity on selfhood cannot be sought among the furniture of the world which engulfs human consciousness, simply negating it ultimately.

           

            Now I have no existence

            No form and no name

            I am the indescribable being

            form and name

(Rta P. 13)

 

            The concept of death is transmitted from physical extinction into a state of the negation of identity. Perhaps death leaves a body here and now, a body that has its earthy identity which is not definable, because it is something to be characterised by the dimensions of space and time or can still further be explained by the mode of causality. In all other metaphysical systems except materialism, death is simply a departure of essence from existence, not an absolute negation at all. A materialist presents or interprets death as a physical or organic dysfunction or complete cessation of a process that caused the epiphenomenon of mind to appear. Idealists identify essence with soul, while materialists do appropriate it to matter. In neither case death seems to be a complete annihilation, but existentialist picture of death is out and out nihilistic since it entails the loss of identity.

 

            So in his poetry which I consider to be positively existential, death assumes a number of forms each of which is a negation of whatever stuff constitutes a web of apparent identity or selfhood. The physicality of human body is simply a relation to the world, considered as something other than what one is. In consciousness this body is contemplated as something other than the mental state because the vacuum in the being is filled to the brim of awareness by positing one’s body as something alien to this feature of thought.

 

            Look at me,

            how I am burning in the flame of Nirvana

            in the circle of this cold fire

(Rta. P. 18)

 

            So abruptly he has brought in the concept of Nirvana, that we feel a little confounded about the exact nature of his connotation of this concept. We are thrown into doubt because he does not try to define it any further than a few experiences of the nature of the loss of identity. As Buddhists mean, this implies an extinction of selfhood, a total negation of its relations to the world, a complete retrieval of essence from its trappings of the evanescent and the ephemeral. But the foremost of this identity is a forlorn physicality and its negation results a further investigation into the nature of other relations.

 

            I fling open my windows

            and behold myself,

            along the high way

            the flight of my feet.

(Rta. P. 18)

 

            These lines clearly suggest that “selfhood” is pictured as something estranged from consciousness of the body, an otherness that often falsely makes up the nothingness of man as a bodily possession. The phenomenon of consciousness cannot be captured in its pure state, in its complete estrangement from the world. To destroy the body as a mark of identity of selfhood is to remove the base on which materialism seeks to build into superstructure. Mr. Mahapatra amply illustrates this negation in all his poems in his collection in Rta, perhaps to set his contents apart from the tradition to which he belongs.

 

            “The Outsider” is a poem that provides a complete text for a featural analysis of his orduous search for identity. There is some nuance of Camus’ influence in an aura of suggestions though it seems splendidly a traditional quest for man’s home in a foreign landscape. The background is somewhat bleak and the tone quite dismal, not unlike what we encounter in Camus’ world.

 

            In all quarter reigns a quietness,

            in the distant horizon

            nothingness flies its discarded garments

            the sky is embarrassed, stars stare at

            the vacant blue

            with a wearied look.

(Rta, P. 20)

 

            Here he depicts a cosmic background to project man’s nothingness of existence against a vast inanity. If the world is taken for something there representing a correctness and certitude of existence, man cannot hope for inhabiting such a world because the climate is quite inhospitable. The objects may have been there and remain still, even in their fullness of being, but man cannot make an entry into this strange world except through his consciousness that captures this ,world as a fantasmal uncertainty.

 

            Footfalls, listen, whose footfalls are lost.

(Rta, P.20)

 

            Man’s footfall is a feeble dissonance in this quietudes of a sullen universe. The looks of stars are weary, the silence of the spheres intonate a monologue not audible to man, however he may attempt at putting a meaning into what seem so remote to his existence, his concern. The salient feature of this selfhood is its residential qualification, his finding a home in the world where he feels transported by projecting his thoughts into every­thing he sees and thus peopling all the inanimate objects with emissions from his awareness. Only at moments of such self-expansion the world seems a favourable place. The moment one withdraws from a contact with the world, one is bound to feel a shrinkage in his self-awareness; all the supports fall away, leaving him afloat in a miasma of inanity almost as endless as the receding space and the backwaters of time. So no hope to inhabit this world or to find a comforting home is likely to be fulfilled. The man remains an outsider.

 

            Another important feature of self-identity is man’s relations with his fellow creatures, strangers in the same place where be wanders homeless. One may be possibly constrained to find this kind of contact and interaction quite warm, soul-inspiring and practically beneficial. A man acquires his normal social identity by a set of interaction, by assuming a number of responsible roles he has to play just for the sake of being where he is. But can he believe these relations to be fructifying in his long quest for identity? Do these features compose the fullness of his being? The poet intent on dissecting this synthetic pattern of his social selfhood into several segments of his relationship with other men and women irrespective of their kinship, ties of intimacy, and social urgency of deeper contact.

 

            In his long epic poem “Bhuma” he has explored all aspects of this socially meaningful selfhood.

 

            O’ my daughter, father, son,

            Grandma, tell me, what’s the spell,

            O’ the dweller in the cell,

            O’ you denizens of this Earth

            that burns in flame of Bell.

(Bhuma, P. 19)

 

            All relations of man have settled down on the barren world, trying to create a spell over what is so, fatuous and inane as human existence. All kinships, and intimacies appear to be as phantasm as delusions in the state of trance. When being is not itself, and consciousness is filled up with the dress of reflections cast by the viscosity of other bodies, the world takes on a dreamlike enchantment. Man comes to create a paradise of human bondage just to fight off his loneliness and nothingness. But this state of trance is as illusory as a man’s dalligence with dreams under the intoxicating spell of narcotics.

 

            The blank grows full

            and the nothingness results in things with traits,

            myriad forms of touch and taste and hue

            and this form full

            that contains beauty, truth and good

            and the forms do rise.

(Bhuma, P. 23.)

 

            In “Bhuma” this existential quest of identity has taken on a different pattern altogether as the theme implies. In “Rta” he has gone through the tortuous tunnel of self-abnegation, pulling off the sheathe of identity layer by layer, arriving at nothingness that guarantees man’s freedom to make his own choice among a profusion of alternatives. The entire theme of “Rta” is a phenomenological analysis of the nature of human substance which is none other than his flickerings of consciousness. This has two distinct poles, one extreme being a total nothingness when it is evacuated of all the reflections, and the other seems to be in a fullness which is an engulfing fullness of physicality. If Nirvan is one end of this consciousness, at the other end we may witness the complete richness of a sensuous texture that defines man’s knowledge of the physical objects. In “Bhuma” the sensuous and the evacuation of all sensibilia are the two modal extremes so often pictured in many encounters and withdrawals.

 

            The world is ecstatic

            drunk with gloried worth.

            The pearl in sea begot it shiny mirth

            Out of dark wet womb

            the spirit springs to birth

(Bhuma, P. 64)

 

            Here he seems to have reached into the heart of the prime existential issue from his outset, so bleakly characterised by frustration, anguish and despair. Being pure and whole is the nothingness which only benefits man by helping him create himself at his own choice. But once man takes a leap if to the world, he finds a fullness of being in setting up his identity through intimations of a varied existence emanating from the contingent phenomena. In such a state there is the grace of enjoying a world, a beauty that fills solitude with moments of pleasure, however fleeting and ungratifying in the long run. In ultimate analysis these moments may lose much of their worth, and the world may finally appear to be drained of all bliss: but these moments have an intensity of feeling that sustains man against the stark despair of nothingness. The poet has travelled from West to East, from his search for identity to a quest for the ground of becoming which seems contrapuntal to his initial stance.

 

            He does not resolve the problems by accepting a particular identity of man as the crux of his essence. This would certainly reduce the tensions which generate the materials of his poetry in modes of persistent contradictions. In his “Bhuma”, which has strong transcendentalism played off against existential pursuit, the tensions continue to remain as strong as ever. And we cannot expect life with its enriched experience, so densely textured out of the warp of thought or woof of emotion to resolve into uniform compositions of some simple material. Any such expectation can only be fulfilled by resolving human existence to a monolithic conceptual scheme which any of the old philoso­phical schools may easily expect contrary to the existentialist approach to life.

 

            In each poem as we have cited here as a singular instance the search seems to continue through persistent questionings to which he neither returns a definitive reply or expects his readers to adopt a particular stance. To be existential is to be always on edge of a precipice threatening with a fractioned selfhood. Questions are abysmal mysteries that stir man’s consciousness leading it away from its cock-sure present into a very uncertain future. In Lone Boatman, a collection of his poems, the poet seems to be moving close to the metaphysics of transcen­dence without overstepping the problems of life. In his first poem, he pictures the situation in a polysemic way by comparing the passage of man through the world to be a lone boatman who slides downstream against his will, as if governed by some other presence which fatally determines the course of his voyage.

 

            He will never know

            where sails his boat

            where does he drift?

            He only knows how to keep afloat.

(Lone Boatman, P. 11)

 

            In “Dead River”, his latest verse, we find a different trend emerging, a chronological concern equally disturbing; but the picture of cosmos that obtains here is partly Vedic and partly existential. The engulfing threat of otherness as something dead, static and cold remains, but there is brought in a causality to seek order in the weird atmosphere of a seemingly chaotic world. Does dead river symbolise life at one end when man feels his essence as complete nothingness from his freedom of action springs into the world, disturbing its equilibrium by a new presence?

 

            Around me

            there was the verdure of woods

            and the dry trees scorched in the sun

            or the sea with surf danced

            or only the undulation of sand.

(Dead River, P. 17)

 

            A. Russell describes this as the feelings of the ego towards the world crystallizing into thoughts of romance of creative selfhood, trying to make use of nature into moments of ecstacy. I think he is not quite correct in interpreting such lines as ecstacy of romance, or dalliance with the beauty of nature. To me, these lines appear to be equally poignant with a laceration implied by the dry trees scorched in the sun contraposed to the verdure woods. Again he has used contradictions to define his real ambivalence towards the world.

 

            In conclusion I wish to point out some features of his philosophical poetry which is something quite original, disturbing and modern in its very relevance, despite his frequent use of Indian myths, philosophical concepts borrowed from diverse schools of Indian philosophy. I call his poetry an existential strain because of the compresence of a thematic and tonal contradiction in the very texture of his verse. The problem for the poet is to explore the area of human consciousness and the explorations as we witness in him is strongly phenomenological. This type of poetry is the resultant of two mainstreams of thoughts interacting within his scheme of ideas, the existential negative clashing with Indian transcendentalism.

 

            A close study of his poetry reveals a positive attitude to life in spite of anguish, pain, torture, and human predicaments in all encounters between self and contingency. The picture is pantheistic, where existence is essence; there is no need to conclude that the search for self-identity is vain as long as man remains free to expand himself either into the world or contract his consciousness into the still point of nothingness. God, nature, the beloved, or beauty of objects it the world are as true as dream, as real as life is, as evanescent as thoughts. Man at the other end of this polarised world is a fiction of consciousness. What remains as the ground of all these concepts is a consciousness with a creative function of its own mated to a very destructive potential. Whether we accept his philosophy as true or dismiss it as sheer in-rational bubblings of a deracinated poet, his poetry does not lose the disturbing quality that haunts any sensitive reader who has put away his book long before.

 

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