Again Thinking

So ends another year. The world has not become a better place and many more will die of war, starvation and disease in the coming year, as they did in 2006. As individuals we will all have had our high points and our low points. We will continue to talk of Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, North Korea and maybe add to this list of troubled spots.

What compassion can/must one have for those who through no fault of their own are born in the so called undeveloped countries and find themselves victims of history, geography, avarice and brutality? We who have the chance to be living in reasonable security and comfort take it for granted and sometimes feel (in unguarded moments of which we are probably ashamed) that those who suffer thus must have deserved it in some way - perhaps because they believe other than what we believe, perhaps because they accept doctrines other than what we know for a fact to be given truth.

It is always easier to condemn someone if we can persuade ourselves of their inhumanity and inherent evil. But unfortunately this is a coin with a reverse side. We are the other side of someone else's coin and seen as the evil ones who will get their come uppance one day. What shock and horror!

We speak of globalisation as a done thing, with the ubiquitous trousers and shirts and blouses and skirts and most of all jeans rolling over robes, kimonos, mundus, loin cloths, saris, baju kurongs,kebayas,etc in the wake of two hundred years of colonization and the cultural annexation by a global language. For trade, of course and the greater good and who cares that age old languages and dialects die and cultures wither.

We the privileged are able to mouse over to anywhere and click into futures that were once science fiction. And play poker online. We can order, pay and receive without leaving home. We speak of the internet as the democratization of peoples forgetting the billions who have neither the infrastructures (water for one, electricity, sanitation) nor the means to afford what for us is instant access to everything.

So yes as this year ends I am sitting at my keyboard saddened by my own hypocrisies - I have spent a quarter century working in these so called developing countries and seen it all at first hand and cannot deny what exists: the dirt, the grime, the sickness, the poverty, corruption, brutality etc etc. But also the dignity, the joy of being alive, the compassion of one for the other, the love, the aspiration for better things.

When aspirations are smashed, old beliefs which are wielded by those who would revert to darker times (because those were times of power and hope) may prove beacons against a globalisation that does not care........

Years end, Years begin

We go on...


Wind

and on the coast
a wind, not high or strong
moves along the surface
gathering momentum to howl
fury worked from resentment.
this storm breaks bonds, tendons
forged in furnaces; bellows in hand
a misshapen god stokes embers -
calloused hands and vengeance run
molten metal into the mould
fate conceived.

invincible the armour, unsurpassed.
sandal firm against the heel,
the heart of death almost full
save only his own, the sand was warm.
and blood,
quivering like the javelin thrown
resurrects for one moment,
achilles, alone.

from After the Hard Hours, this Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore 1975

The human condition has always been, and still is, a fascinating area of study.

My childhood in Kerala and Singapore, adulthood in Singapore, Pakistan and France, with work-induced travel all over the world and now "la troisieme age" in France, have provided opportunities to view at close hand the sameness of human aspiration but, sadly, also the sameness of the way in which we manage to turn these aspirations against ourselves through a belief that what we hold dear is sacrosanct, the only divine truth, and that all those who deny this truth must be put, (literally unfortunately in many parts of the world) to the sword.

Human evolution perhaps once demanded that one defy the next family, the next tribe in the perilous search for shelter and sustenance. Natural selection perhaps did enhance ruthless selfishness to the extent that even when cooperation in group activities garnered better safety and richer rewards; the push to kill, grab and run remains paramount.

One is always afraid of loss, always afraid of the other. This has in time become the driving force of group consciousness and evolved into the political doctrine that what the others believe is false and reinforced the comforting belief that truth and justice were always behind one's own actions.

But our own ingenuity in making travel easy and in making international and national barriers porous has breached the bastions of belief and called into question so-called facts that less than half a century ago were held to be "incontestable": that some were divinely ordained to be the masters of others.

Called into question but not dispelled, as the wars in the Middle East, Sudan, Afghanistan and other places prove on a daily basis. Once upon a time when I was young, I tried to comprehend:

from The Interior Landscape of the Heart

I

the interior landscape of the heart
against which days are held
for photographs, recorded moment succeeding
other moments laid end on end conspire
into one life: there are no new landscapes
to discover, we have forgotten
computations for the angle of the sun,
the use of light on a fading day
to measure distances between hearts.
the hands we hold against our sides
do not reach to find the universe,
only the shutters of the mind expose
this inertness.

Thinking of my own growth as a poet, I recognize a number of poems - my own and those of others - which define stages of my development. My poem Re:Love while falling in love with my wife, Ivy, was undoubtedly one.

One of the main preoccupations of any young person is undoubtedly love, whatever one understands by the term at any given point. Love is a difficult word to define and can be that which one feels towards an object or person for whom one feels more than a common regard, which itself is difficult to define.

For me, when I was young, love symbolized freedom, the ability to decide for oneself, to unbind the self from the mundane; but the experience of something is never the same as the anticipated intellectual appreciation of the thing.

For love can also be lifelong submission to the point of enslavement, with torment and hurt to follow. So how does one learn what love is?

When one reads the poets one gets the widest variety of experiences and contradictions possible. The whole matter seems irreal and confused.

So what is the truth of the matter?

The truth is that we have to learn to recognize love, to appreciate the validity of the other and come to terms with our own expectations.

No other is going to be exactly what we pictured in our minds and we are going to be very disappointed if we cannot grow with and learn the reality of the other, to have and accept less than our Platonic ideal of the ideal lover.

Poets teach us this by speaking their truth as they have lived it. And whether it is Dante going through Hell for Beatrice, the Sanskrit love poets talking to parrots about their faithless loves, or Shakespeare taming his Shrew, each has a lesson for us.

I believe my reading of Cattalus more than any other was a milestone in my life. What did I do with this precious knowledge? I fell in love and wrote a poem.


Re:Love

from first principles
painfully working the emotions
I learnt love
with almost quiescent content.

love, I learnt from stone faces
that cut sensitivity into anger
that grew within the mind, fences.

love, I learnt from steel-hearted poets
who had thrown flesh and blood
into other hearts and found, furnaces.

love I learnt from those who claimed
torn and bleeding and full of blame:
no soul born now emerged unmaimed.

love I learnt and thought I knew -
love failed, love torn, love possessed.
all these I felt and bore within the husk:
now the rain washes stone-faced memory
and poets of steel lie dead in books.
unmaimed I walk with you
untorn, unresentful and unpossessed.



From After the Hard Hours This Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975

The headlines speak again of war and natural disasters.

Add the human designed suicide bombers and we can say we live in normal times.

The United Nations is again speaking of the need for peace and sustainable development. That too is normal as that is what it was designed to do.

Policy makers worldwide are busy making policy. And all admit that this policy is geared towards the well being of nations, peoples and the world.

So why is it that there is so much conflict, uncertainty and suffering in the world today, and yet more on the horizon?

Is it that humans are biologically driven to conflict and destruction by their evolutionary past where only the toughest and meanest survived?

Is war and destruction a result of unsustainable populations eking out lives on meagre resources or is it due to the unfair distribution of these resources? Perhaps our misuse of nature and its bounties in the recent past has hastened and magnified the condition. Are we at or fast approaching the point of no return? Or is it that destruction of humans by other humans is merely the representation of our cultural diversity and therefore there is nothing to be done?

Questions, questions.


Resurrection

shades in the black night confess eyes
we come within seconds of total light.
something palls and no affirmation comes -
we have seen tenderness as leaves
unfolding into the morning light,
watched with vengeance, seen the play
straining into the darkest night,
resisted human love as roots
that grow between carefully welded days,
denied hopeful beginnings the right of life
and prayed for some sort of rain.
we have heard thunder speak its anger
cringed before its scorching tongue,
lost all and reduced to nothing
found human tenderness in love unsung.

else resilience impregnates our wounds.
we resist only till the core is breached.
when love dies there is no imagining
the hardness a human heart can reach.


from After the Hard Hours, This Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore 1975.

More than a thousand years ago the poet Lee Hou Chou, who was also the last emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty of China, asked of himself

hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?

Today our daily headlines bring daily hatred and sorrow into our lives. But for most of us it's other people's sorrow and other people's hatred's.

We feel safe behind distance, our daily certainties and the fact that it can never happen here (except of course if you happen to live where it is already happening - Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Kashmir, to name but a few).

Yet how sure can we be that something won't change tomorrow at home, where we live? Because we live there and know our neighbors, have a good democratic system of government and have a reasonable standard of living? Nigerians would have told you that in the mid sixties before Biafra, South Vietnamese would have said the same before the conflict that made boat people of a great many. So if it could happen to them, then why not to us?

There are stirrings based on extremist religious movements in South East Asia; Eastern and Central European republics are beset by separatist movements driven by national identities linked to religious differences and colonial pasts; in Latin America numerous rebel movements fighting governments base the justness of their cause on racial exclusion and oppression; while Africa smolders in a welter of corruption, ethnic and tribal conflicts and poverty.

For some it is only the installation of the democratic system ( even if this has to done by force and with the deaths of a great number of people) that can change the situation and ensure world peace, for others education is the key to allowing individual progress. For yet others it lies in one word," modernization". A counter-movement says return to the roots, eschew modernity (and some would even impose this return to the past by force).

Lee Hou Chou wrote his poem as a prisoner of the Sung Emperor in Peking, having lost everything but his life (he was soon to lose this too). Is there no lesson we can learn from him?


hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?
yet to devote the soul
to love eternal of one's land
and wake to find only
a patriot's despairing tears:

what greater hatred or sorrow?

can anyone match
my height of desolation?
long shall I remember,
stare afar as I remember
autumn

how empty can the past be?
was it all a dream?

tell me, tell me


from The Poems and Lyrics of the Last Lord Lee
translated by Koh Ho Peng and Chandran Nair
Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975

There are moments in life when sadness overwhelms you, becomes sadness unending.

You wonder at the unfairness of it all and fall into the why me? mode, till you remember you have been there before, have outlasted the last all-crushing blow and found the courage to go on, to hope for better things.

Someone else called it The Courage to Be. Sooner or later all of us will need to find this courage to be - it could be called for at the advent of an illness, at the loss of a loved one or at the loss of love itself.

Whatever the reason and timing of the call upon our reserves of inner strength, it is never ever going to be easy to live the day to day as if nothing has happened.

One should not live a single day as if nothing has happened. Things happen all the time, good things, bad things, indifferent things.

Accepting things for what they are (and not for what we think they are) is the first step towards the courage to be.


A long time ago at 24, before accepting that the courage to be has to born from within, cannot be an external covering even if woven with love and tenderness, I attempted to portray



sadness unending

because love is torn from the mind
of a small boy in the hurt aftermath
of death, its colour is black.
there is no joy in death
for the small boy to bear to the edge
of impending manhood, only the colour
enlarging the dark mind with black
asserting the sameness of love,
to the death wish of flowers
dying in the sun they adore.

because death is the god given choice
of lovers they choose to live
as priests of their destruction
deified in the colour of death
love walks in us all
walks, talks and turns from faces
of impending death, from the corner
of a loving hand, into eyes
a soft melody in a mournful flute
of a young lover drowned
in the sadness impending.

because death is around some corner
we walk in avenues of love
deifying idols cast in our images
challenging the voice of the sea
mocking the sour poet
walking alone in his mind
singing of death to himself
gathering dew in his night eyes
aware that no morning sun
will dry the tears of the dead
or the dying.


published in Commentary Vol.4 No.2, January 1980
University of Singapore Society, Singapore