cultivating mirages
by Douglas Messerli
Ranjit Hoskote Central Time: Poems 2006-2014 (New Delhi: Penguin Book Boos India,
2014)
Indian Anglophone poet Ranjit
Hoskote’s most recent collection of poetry, Central
Time, is filled with poems that simultaneously move in several directions.
Superficially, Hoskote’s works incorporate literary references that move
historically back in time to include the Sanskrit Poets, the Ghazal’s of
Persian poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Don Quixote, and the Persian
miniature master Kamāl ud-Din Behzād among others and includes enough literary
apostrophes (“Annalist of the solar magistracy, I cannot complain.” [from “The
Book of the Night”]; “Heart, last philosopher to fall / prey to the biting
intolerance of gravel:” [from “Evening Landscape], and to numerous unknown
figures, “It’s nearly noon and you’re still balancing on the diving / board”
[from “Immersion Technique”] and “Put on these wings” [from “The First and Last
Portrait”] to please any Romantic poetry connoisseur. Clearly, this poet
perceives almost a sense of necessity in revealing the past—not just of poetry
but the whole of his culture—often romanticized, trivialized, and forgotten by
the West:
The Burden of
History
A bird sits on
a branch
of the fury
tree:
a bird as big
as India.
It’s sleeping
now.
You can see it
if you tilt
your head..
It’s crouched
inside
the amber
paperweight
on my desk:
shrunken,
waiting for release.
It is clear, accordingly, throughout all of this Mumbai poet’s writing,
that he feels, at times, almost as a kind of curator—a role that Hoskote
performs in his daily life as well as writing—in which he attempts to bring, as
he metaphorically puts it, “dawn birds back to life from stone.” [“Fossil
Curator”]. And even if he ultimately fails in that task, he argues, “These
events are no less real for taking place inside a head.” With his deep involvement in art, is it any
wonder, moreover, that a great many of poems deal with artists as varied as
Chardin, Hopper, Morandi, Brancusi, Serra, and Beuys, to name just a few?
Basically, this writer’s oeuvre,
however, appears to fit nicely into the late modernist tradition in its heavy
use of narrative structures and metaphor. One might argue that narrative is
embedded in nearly all of Hoskote’s poems, and, at times, as in “The Guide
Recalls the Mountain,” and “Lunch at Britannia,” for example, where his usually
dense vocabulary and syntax gives way to the slightly ironic bemusement, his
poems are mixed with cultural references that might well have been at home in
the personal “histories” of someone like Robert Lowell.
It is nearly impossible to read
Hoskote’s poems without uncovering the everyday and, more often, highly
abstract metaphors. “A caravan of domes / hangs in the scored air….” [in
“Desert”], “It’s raining daggers. I’ll wake up drenched, skin bruised, eyes
stung by the flute….” [in “Rain”], “rust” peels from trees [in “Portrait of an
Unknown Master], a “singing breath” is “anchored by ledgers.” [in “Rehearsal
for Departure”].
But unlike the common modernist use of such metaphors, Hosokte’s
comparisons do not simply help the reader reimagine the realist world, but
often contort it. And, in that sense, this poet’s metaphoric landscape
represents less a regeneration of perception than an explosion of it. As
critics such as Zachary Busnell in Time
Out have described the works in this volume, his poems often become
“weapons,” a speeding “train.” As the poet himself puts it some poems “explode
on impact; others have a long fuse.” In
short, Hoskote’s exploding metaphors often defeat the realist modernists’
attempts to heighten and expand the natural world by blowing up the original
object or image with which the line began. Skin “is miles long when stretched
out flat,” [“Uses for an executed Dissident”]. “The Soloist Performs with an
Orchestra of Events,” for example begins in a kind of contained naturalist
world:
The greenest
things happen when you’re not looking:
creepers braid
themselves around a bridge,
clouds surround
a tower, nudge it towards a dead end
and neon
measures the length of the cobbled street.”
Combined with the heavy layering of historical names and references
which I’ve already mentioned and the density of his vocabulary (for example,
“coment-maned, meteor eyed, throat belling with wolf-howl” [“The Secret
Agent”], the Mumbai poet’s poems seem nearly often ready to immediately abandon
their modernist pretensions. If we recognize that Hoskote loves nature and
that, at times, his poems become almost an architectural space in which one
might walk, sit, and even sleep, we also perceive that in these spaces we are
entirely safe. The world he presents is a kind of modernist fraud, which in the
end, often pulls his poems into a surprising, overwhelming postmodernist
frenzy.
Of course, we should have known that anyone in love with aphorisms as
much as Hoskote might be telling us a kind of twisted truth. Time and again
this poet posits lines that may sound like sacred wisdom but that, upon a
second thought, are revealed as sophistry. Beside the aphorism I quoted above
(The greenest things happen when you’re not looking.”) below are some further
examples:
“The palace of illusions shows no mercy”
[“Knowing Your Way Around”
“The faster I run, the faster the oasis
runs from me.” [“Night Runner”]
“Land is what you sight from a
storm-broken ship
the mirage they forgot to sink.” [“Harbour Thoughts”]
“Fear translation.” [“Chimera”]
“The skin is miles long when stretched
out flat.” [“Uses for an Executed Dissident”]
“Beware the pent-up heaviness of
traces….” [“Base Camp of the Lost Expedition”]
“Paradise is a narrow waterway….” [“The
Navigator’s Last Entry”]
Reading these and the numerous others one encounters in this poet’s
work, one might almost think he was reading Gertrude Stein. But Stein’s
sometimes dangerous aphorisms, at least superficially, are outwardly placid,
while Hoskote’s generalized realities often lead to dangerous pitfalls, a world
not only intellectually unstable but spatially terrifying. What might seem to
be a fiction is, as he warns us, a “documentary,” evidence of something that
has already happened, “the dark tidal against us.” [“Documentary”]. Throughout
his writing, disaster strikes. A cashier drags out his striped awning only to
witness the entire world around him explode, with “Beheaded men” walking
through the smoke [“Late Lunch in a Besieged City”]. Love is compared to
“letting go, feet first / from the bomb bay…” [“Free Fall”] A loving mother
turns around to see her child “trapped between layers of mud” in a “volcanic
fire.” [“Fern”]. In “The Collector of Meteor Dust” the moon “blows up, fades.” Even
the tide of a crescent beach, “tears up barbed-wire fencing, splits brickwork
shells.” [“The Enemy’s Country].
If we have presumed Hoskote’s spaces to be a lovely territory we might
leisurely explore, we are sadly mistaken. As he warns in “Cutting Device,”—a
poem dedicated to the sculptor of dangerously balanced heavy slabs of steel,
Richard Serra—“You’ve landed in fog on a clear day.” Hoskote’s natural world is
not that of his grandfather.
The alternative to what might first appear to be lovely towers of some
architectural wonder, are, as the poet suggests in “The Nomad’s Song,” “mirages” which he has cultivated and by which
he to be judged. Faced by a world in which “The true believer has lost his
touch” and “His past is a field of marble testaments,” the reader can only look
to the artist for the beautiful mirages he has created as a way out. If space
has trapped us into a timeless void, Hoskote as he argues in “Coutdown” has
“painted a door on the wall / for the wind to gallop through….” a way out. Time
begins over: “I’m painting the numbers back on the clock.” Art is prepared to
truly transform reality: “My origami swan is ready to fly.”
Has Hoskote, in Central Time,
not only created a major new work of poetry, but has suggested an alternative
to the threatening world in which we daily face our lives.
Los Angeles, July 1, 2014
