Topic started by rjay (@ brkfw0005.navistar.com) on Fri Mar 10 16:05:50 .
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Is anybody there?
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Responses:
- From: haris (@ inet-fw2-o.oracle.com)
on: Wed Mar 15 12:45:44 EST 2000
rjay,
indra pArthasArathy has written an article on hykoo in www.minnambalam.com. May be that would give an insight about this..
i think they dont expect the audience to understand - but to feel.. ( or something like that...)
- From: rjay (@ brkfw0005.navistar.com)
on: Thu Mar 16 10:17:30 EST 2000
Thank you haris,
I will read it,
rjay
- From: Ramji (@ 205.177.170.105)
on: Wed May 24 11:34:46 EDT 2000
haris,
I was stunned by the simplicity of your explanation. Here is another sample I have copied\pasted from kavidhaigal thread.
From: vj (@ lucre.tcom.purdue.edu) on: Thu May 18 14:12:38 EDT 2000
Yesterday I
was caught watching
a sunrise.
- From: Saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu)
on: Sun Jun 11 21:51:55 EDT 2000
Hi folks,
I know Devathachchan from when he started off as a poet. Even then, his directness and capacity to bend prose into elegant images captivated a few who were editing a literary magazine and chose to publish him. I remember his first few poems. One was about a sliver of time- the frozen moment when a writer returns from the act of drinking water, to a half written sheet of paper that is fluttering in a gentle breeze. The atmosphere-of a stalled act of reflection-was a still photo of a person’s life captured in just a few lines of a rare transparency that a photograph may not have delivered.
Simple activities of day to day life get transformed in his hands as extraordinarily shimmering pieces that invite you to examine them as if they are from a different planet or as if they are a part of another sentient species’ activity. That distancing also brings you close to humans as species. For example think of the image of a little frog sitting on top of a floating dead woman’s body in one of these poems. The frog is completely oblivious to the tragedy under its body. It could be us as people who are passing by. But can you even imagine the tranquility and the innocence with which it is resting there? Does it even have any comprehension of what it is doing?
Have you been in such a situation before, where bodies float in stagnant pools of water, say after a huge flood or storm or tidal wave has washed off people of a place? Such places have an eerie calm after the havoc and large scale tragedy that had taken place in the location may be just half a day earlier. The trmendous sense of despondency one will experiency before the meaninglessness of such tragedies has to be experienced to perhaps relate to this poem. I felt as if I was witnessing the recent destruction in Orissa as I read this poem.
It is just that we need to have some capacity to transport ourselves to the scene or build an image in ourselves to experience the human life in a series of images he evokes. That is just the beginning of course. If you have an agenda in reading poetry, like say stating or propagating a progressive ideology, or of achieving a clarity about some idea etc, may be DT will not appeal to you.
He is a voyager and a messenger of unexpected messages. Sometimes unwanted experiences too.
- From: Saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu)
on: Sun Jun 11 22:02:16 EDT 2000
Just another note on DT.
As for another, the image of the shephard standing patiently near the railway gate is something we will pass by almost without any special notice in our travels. But DT captures it in a few lines and seeks to lock our perception to both the physicality and the time that is invisible behind the man. He gently prods us to look beyond the appearance into the past of this patient man and his life. What do we know of such people as humans? The usual attributes of the man will be something we will all experience at once-his poverty or his location in the spatial distribution community,occupation, education, power etc. But the experience of this human of the same element of 'time' that all of us have travelled through with him? Do we experience him as a fellow traveller at all at that moment? Do we wonder if this travel had been useful or meaningful to him as a human? As meaningful as it has been to us as individuals? Can we even speculate on the layers and layers of time that he has experienced in such a patient wait?
In this case I could only think of a movie about shephards I had seen many years before. Tavionni(?) brother’s ‘Padre Padrone’-that film details the brutality of such a life where the shephards more or less spend a huge portion of their lives in the remote Italian mountains without human company. The life of such people is filled with the silence or general eventlessness of nature, and civilization drops away from them. And then nature stages its events with the barest of warnings and savages their lives swiftly too. This uncertainty and the monotony dehumanizes them in many ways. yet they remain all too human mostly, especially when they return to their villages once in few months. Then they experience almost a cultural shock.
Here DT perhaps invites us to experience the cultural shock in reverse, by inviting us into his life of vast empty spaces where the animals are all the company one gets.
For a parallel we need to see mani kaul’s extraordinary first film ‘uski roti’ which is about a similarly desultory waiting,on the part of a young wife, of a long distance bus driver who passes through the village twice a day driving his bus. He visits her perhaps once a week on his off duty day, and spends it in sex, food and sleep. Her entire life is to be the deliverer of the Roti and food to him. Silence, mechanical drudgery and the waiting are all she gets for life. She patiently waits for him under the thin shade of a tree in a vast plain space in the desert climate of Punjab (?)day after day. It teaches us something about human life as it was and is conducted for centuries, in a few hundreds of frames, and may be reminds us that this is how workers live as experiencing humans.
There are other interesting things in this set of poems. If others care to get into explaining what they got out of these that will be good.
- From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu)
on: Sun Jun 11 22:27:01 EDT 2000
Please read the few lines about the little squirrel, and what the poet wishes by the act of gifting the squirrel. it is as though the poems are like the little squirrel. Experiencing life from different branches, and knowing the secrets of different holes as only little animals can know etc are some learning that he wishes on us. it is a simple yearning and at once transports us to different planes of meaning. Parents of young children often look at their children and wish they could deliver the experiential knowledge of the world that they have to the children. a poet perhaps feels this urge to deliver to us his fluid imagination about all of humanity, all the time?
- From: Gokul (@ 192.190.51.11)
on: Mon Jun 12 14:29:35 EDT 2000
Saranath,
Your descriptions are as captivating as the poems
of Mr.Devathachchan. Thank you. Please continue.
I would share some of his poems (from a collection) soon, in the poetry thread.
-Gokul
- From: Ettappan (@ ac905b98.ipt.aol.com)
on: Mon Jun 12 23:35:02 EDT 2000
Saranath,
How can you praise a modern-poet who has not contributed anything for the great and ancient Tamil culture? You must first praise great people like Thiruvalluvar. you must be able to respond correctly if I ask what is KuRal no. 712? Then you must talk in length about Seyamkondar and Kalignaththupparani and appreciate how the conversation between Kaali and Kooni has been described there. Then only you can talk about these modern non-senses. OK?
Ettappan
- From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu)
on: Tue Jun 13 11:13:14 EDT 2000
what Ettappan says is quite true in one way. For many in Tn, particularly in the Tamil academy, language is primordial, a test of loyalty, a badge of honor, a way to construct self and more. It is in short an obsession, very much like the obsession about Karpu among some non-academic Tamil elite in some other threads here. It is also a regulatory club in the hands of people who do not want to live in the 21st century, but wish to live with bullock carts, wooden plough, high infant mortality and small pox. I say thanks for the invitation, I am too happy here in the middle of my own miserable ecological disaster of a world with all its chemical pollution.
For me language is no one's prperty. It does not determine who I am. I will not reify it. It is not my creation, yes. But it is human creation, and I will not allow this tool to become my master. I refuse to look at language as my mother, father or master or god or goddess. I do not need to believe in language. I need to flex it as deftly as i can. It is i insist nothing but a medium, a good way to express myself adequately so others can understand me, and I, others. Thoughts and actions emerge through language for me, and I do not care for the other process. If it is your amrutham, do enjoy it. That is what gnanakoothan meant in his short poem, for which people gave him a lot of grief, calling his caste into question. Remember, he said, 'Enakkum Tamizhthaan moochu, aanaal athaip piRar meel vida maatten'. he may have been a poet of many parts as others contend, but in this poem he is the truly modern (liberal) who respects your individuality and hopes that you will, his. Since I do not need to understand ayatollah khomeini's obsessions, as I do not live under him, I do not need to understand people who are obsessed about Tamil's chastity. They do not rule me, nor will I let them. It is not their property or territory or nation or anything that is physical or corporeal.
Thanks to Ettappan here, who is obviously joking, the situation can be easily clarified here. The whole ethos of modernist movement in Tami literature from the 40's (?) let us say from Pudumaip piththan-the name reveals it all- Ku.Pa.Ra, Mouni, Si.Su.Se,J.K., to people like Poomani, Surya deepan, Ambai et al. is at its core, if it has one such, an attempt at rethinking themselves, the communities and the whole society. They demand the right to reimagine the path before their own selves and their fellow Tamils. Post modernist thought in Tamil has taken a different route in this, but that is an entirely different thread all by itself. The dravidian movement is both primordial and modernist. That is a paradox and internal contradiction it has to learn to overcome. Post modernism perhaps offers this chance to dravidian movement, if this is taken up seriously by the movement elites. At least some among them seem inclined to do this. That is a hope (for people like me).
- From: Ettappan (@ 166.73.253.174)
on: Tue Jun 13 12:19:23 EDT 2000
Saranath,
Thanks for your explanation about the relationship between human race and Language. But you have to get nod from the authorities in Sangam literature. We may accept your views if it would not harm or destroy the billion years old
Tamil Civilization, in which our women chased away dinosaurs with broom-sticks.
Ettappan
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