Remembering Pete Seeger

The dog at the crossing

Always knows his bones

The old and the shiny ones

The ones  always thrown...



You may not come

But snow never fails

Old banjo sits in silence

And shines at the crossing...



His lips changed the breeze

Footsteps singing the snow...



And the dog stands silent

Among his untouched bones...

In Cense

There is a fragrant candle in my room

Don't you dare call me lonely!

Seasons came and went

And the insistent skies...

That's my walk there!

Trees have grown into it

Tooth and nail

Fangs and claws

Little room left for walking

I close in on the branches to breathe the distance

There is a fragrant candle in my room

Don't you dare call me lonely!

One of these days

I will grow into my path

My leafy palms know the trick

There I am

Where my two shadows meet on the glass

One which always proceeds

And the other which never fails to recede

I am the meeting point of a perpetual return journey

The candle burns and offers incense

In sense, it can never be lonely.

On Watching Pan Pan's All That Fall by Beckett

Pan Pan Theatre Company's production of Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall is a uniquely synesthetic experience of radiophonic theatre on stage with pre-recorded voices and intriguingly shifting lights and sounds. It poetically circumvents Sam's insistence on not having his radio plays staged due to what he considered to be their acutely medium-specific character. 

We walked our way into the auditorium and cut through the regular seats for the audience to go straight up on to the stage where the curtain had a little mouth (or Mouth?) to suck us in.

There we were: the entire audience right on the stage, seated on Beckettian rocking chairs and the auditory drama began. The inspiration was perhaps Ionesco's The Chairs with all those empty chairs on stage. The text was punctuated with lighting which indexed the different moments of encounters inside the text. The glaring yellow lights through holes, we faced kept coming and going. To add to that, there were the beautiful drizzle-like overhead lights and the footlights from our back. The lights at the front generated complex patterns on their own, often reminding me of the melodious flute in which different holes are activated at different points to produce the tune.

The sounds were in swing with Beckett's instructions; the acting as invocation was spot on, striking the right balance between an overstated hysteria and an understated pathos alongside a mix of heady laughs, as always with Beckett.

I liked this one more than their recent Beckett production Embers, I saw last year in Dublin. The huge skull on stage in Embers had divided the impact between the auditory and the visual. With All That Fall, I thought they stuck to the radical edge of performance which playwrights like Beckett demand and dared to transform the stage into a curiously intimate and yet collective hearing chamber and for me that is putting the right emphasis as far as Beckett is concerned.

All in all, a spectacular and spectral hearing!

A bit translation on Shakti's Birthday

হৈদরের সঙ্গে ছুটতে ছুটতে শাদা ধানের ক্ষেত মাড়িয়ে আল ধরে পৌছে দেখলাম, দাদু বুকের ওপর হাত দুটো জড়ো করে অঘ্রাণের ধানের বিছানায় 
শুয়ে রয়েছেন। হাঁ করা মুখ থেকে আর প্রস্ফুটিত চোখ দুটি থেকে কোনপথে যেন বের হয়ে গেছে দাদুর বৃদ্ধপ্রাণ। ঘরের মধ্যের মর্ত্যের বিছানা ছেড়ে আবদ্ধ পরিসিমাভুক্ত বাতাসের অভাব এতদিন বাদে তাঁকে বাইরে, মাঠের বুকে ধানের বিছানায় শুইয়ে অফুরন্ত বাতাসের বাধাহীন প্রবাহের মাঝে হত্যা করে।

--------------------শক্তি চট্টোপাধ্যায়ের কুঁয়োতলা উপন্যাসের শেষের দিকের এই দৃশ্য ও তার বিবরণ আমার বড় প্রিয়।

আজ কবির জন্মদিনে তার গদ্যের এই গার্হস্থ্য স্মরণে এলো আবার।

গদ্যের শরীরে কবিতার এহেন বেঁচে থাকা মৃত্যু নিয়ে এলো মোটিফের জগতে।

এক দীর্ঘ স্পাইরাল বাক্য তার নাব্যতা নিয়ে হত্যালীলায় মত্ত এখানে।

হত্যা করলো বাতাসের অভাব; বাতাস নয় কিন্তু, আর হত্যা যেথায় করলো সেথায় ছিল অফুরান বাতাস!

অভাব আর অতিরিক্ততার এই সংযোগ-বিন্দুই কবিতার আবাহন এবং অবগাহন!

It's impossible to produce this syntactic spirality in English and the indeterminacy of the agent is lost in the translated syntax too...still, I do think it is important to open up Shakti's Kuontola for an English audience...this task of translation is due and I may just do this one day in distant future...as of now a temporary working translation of this majestic last line goes:

A lack of circumspect wind killed him after so many years; away from the earth's bed back at home, hurling him into this paddy-bed amid the endless ripples of a gigantic excess of wind.

Happy Birthday Shakti Chattopadhyay

On the movie Mama

"A ghost is an emotion bent out of shape condemned to repeat itself time and time again until it rights the wrong that was done"

I thought this was a spectacular definition of the ghost implying spectral justice or may be justice itself as a spectral phenomenon...

It comes from the horror film Mama (2013)...recommended for not just the horror movie buffs but people who like to think about the spectre... 

I thought it was a classy horror film which was both chilly and moving in its own way...what visuals too! the visual poetics of horror at its best! And along with everything else, that lingering passage of affect...

Ghost is indeed an 'emotion' more than anything else and as the finale tells us, human beings should have the independence to choose between themselves and ghosts...

Cinema Snippets 3: The Skin I Live In

Pedro Almodóvar's film The Skin I Live In is a film which makes me think about the skin as a symptom...well, if the ego is a symptom for Lacan and the skin the inmost kin of the ego for Anzieu, put together, we can perhaps say by way of a deductive conclusion that the skin too is a symptom.

The husband whose wife cheats him through the skin gets all burnt and the doctor husband takes after the smell of her burnt skin but she cannot take it and commits suicide. Then comes the second episode in which his daughter is raped, again through the skin! Sexual violation is let in by the skin and the trauma kills her in the end. The man then kidnaps the rapist and performs a vaginoplasty, making a woman of him and then builds the strongest artificial skin for her...he falls for her gradually only to be betrayed at the end.

The drives are complex here: the doctor may begin the experiment with the purpose of taking revenge on his daughter's rapist but the skin he gives her and the face is that of her dead wife! He even names the experiment after her! The revenge is slowly replaced by first pleasure and then love and makes for a startling situation:---

A man making love with a man-turned-woman who had raped his daughter and is made to look like his dead wife who had cheated on him! The man tries to produce an orifice where there is none so that he can make inroads into the inner fold of the skin through the sexual act which was responsible for both the demises of his wife and daughter in two different ways. And in all this, the skin is the site for violence, violation, pleasure and a sense of identity which dissipates with time...

The Skin I Live In is compelling in triggering these intriguing thoughts and one of the most psychoanalytically informed film directors of our times does not disappoint!

The patient's escapade at the end only underscores how the skin is a symptom because it often blurs the fine line between the self and the ego: a distinction, we must try and maintain at any cost.

On Watching Genet's The Maids

Yesterday's performance of Jean Genet's The Maids by Sydney Theatre Company extended the dynamics of theatre and almost blurred the margin between theatre and cinema by using the onscreen projection throughout to foreground motifs, props and expressions in close ups as the cameras kept moving in and out from all sides...it was like two parallel experiences, one theatrical and the other, cinematic...that was consistent with the play in the sense that Genet's maids are role-players: 'actors' in a self-reflexive way and for this performance, we had two big names from cinema (Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert)...as if the screen actresses stepped into the play from their own world of filmic acting and carried their reel-identities with them...

I really liked the way the performance exploited the hysteric and melodramatic elements in the play because that is an unmistakable aspect of Genet's art which is so easy to neglect due to his prevalent image as an 'intellectual', 'anti-theatrical' and 'anti-realist' playwright.

I appreciated the fact that the innovation in the production stayed within Genet's own world for example the multiple glass walls which created a strong mirroring effect reminded a Genet-lover like me of his play The Balcony and the general importance of mirroring techniques in his theatre.

The performances were superlative...

A great experience...

My Translation of Kabir Suman's Phoolmoni Song

PHULMONI SONG:

Look, Phulmoni 
Carbaine in hands
Rifles on shoulders 
I sing this song for the encounter has finally captured you 
It's only the body which gets captured
The mind can never be!
The distant Shaal trees are waving in the uncapturable winds
Just like you, Ishraat Jahan is my younger sister too!

Look, Phulmoni,
There, Ishraat lying dead 
Killed only by the encounter 
No AK 47 in her hands though
It's only the body which gets captured
The mind can never be!
The distant Shaal trees are waving in the uncapturable winds
Just like you, Ishraat Jahan is my younger sister too!

Look, Phulmoni,
Morning newspaper 
Has printed your pretty picture
Beneath your calm face 
I can see the sparks of revolt
Fire within and fire without
All in flames like Gujraat
To save up the fire in the belly 
Is called terrorism in their eyes!

Listen, Phulmoni, 
Seeing your picture
I shed my silent tears 
My tears will light up a fire
Yes, I am a terrorist!
Look Phulmoni, I am ageing
Little happiness here and there
In your picture, you are that face of my procession 
Have you heard the poem by Subhash
'Girl, when did you go into the forest?'
I am reminded once again of Che Guevara's story 
It's only the body which gets captured
The mind can never be!

The distant Shaal trees are waving in the uncapturable winds
Just like you, Ishraat Jahan is my younger sister too!
Tell, Phulmoni, What can this little song do?
Can't even be a tiny prick at the margins of your path!
In the globalised share-market this country has been sold
This song too shall be sold in the market in the end

Look, Phulmoni 
It's not my job 
To sniffle over this 
I know there is resistance still 
In the forests of Jharkhand 
Be it amateur, still this song is one slice of resistance!
Your struggle in my voice is the teaching of its life
It's only the body which gets captured
The mind can never be!

The distant Shaal trees are waving in the uncapturable winds
Just like you, Ishraat Jahan is my younger sister too!

Translation of Kabir Suman's Song Shabash Poolish

On Homer and Langley

E L Doctorow's novel Homer and Langley (2009) is a heartrendingly beautiful imaginary history of the Collyer brothers.

Homer, the musician who goes blind gradually and gains a particularly sharp hearing in turn till a point when his hearing too, starts to fail and writing becomes his only way of gaining a sense of the external world outside of his frustratingly self-enclosed consciousness. 

Langley, a First World War survivor keeps himself going with his bizarre experiments and philosophical theories, his magnum opus being the formation of an eternal newspaper which will contain all possible news items as archetypes and all that would happen after its final formation would be nothing but the iconic replacements of the fundamental patterns traced in that news archive.

And then there is of course the Collyer mansion in Manhattan which gradually turns into a grotesque museum of sorts with Langley's increasingly ambitious experiments with all kinds of scrap objects. The tactility of a space where objects are packed into thin air emanates a rare radiance of aesthetic beauty here.

The tragi-comic life of the Collyer brothers is shot through Doctorow's vividly sensuous imagination and offers us a profound insight into the melancholic beauty of literary writing when it becomes nothing short of a last resort:

"There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother's hand to know that I am not alone.


Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food? There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?"

Snippets on Cinema 2: Tasher Desh

Read Tagore's play Tasher Desh once again and then saw its cinematic adaptation by Q. 

For me, a significant question Rabindranath's play asks has to do with the dialectic of desire and law in the world of dreams. Rabindranath's counter-Freudian masterstroke was to see the 'machinic unconscious' as a world of 'law' which represses the real of desire with linguistic codification and hence the distinctively discursive and Symbolic apparatus of the playing card as a paradigm of the non-human in the dream world.

The yawn at the origin of the card species and the sneeze which mythifies the origins of the human have to be taken seriously in terms of their stress on the corporeal in its relation to the birth of words. The upward yawn and the downward sneeze are both aerated emanations of the body in all its sensations and they play with the edge of spoken language which is a companion piece of the two. There are a host of other such brilliant innovations in the play relating to the human and the non-human in association with the unconscious formation of dreams which merit minute analysis. Tagore's project of humanising the figurative world of dreams where the symbolic undercuts the real affect of the human is a memorable journey on its own. This could have been a potential direction for an adaptive teasing out of things but the film does not go there...fair enough...

And of course there is the layer of political allegory and a critique of dictatorship; the play's dedication to Netaji Subhashchandra Bose spells it out in a way. This is the track followed and radicalised by Q in the film. I have no problems with eroticising the original because it does offer that possibility but to reduce the problem of law and freedom to 'sexuality' is too much of an exclusionism I felt!

As if the 'uncovering' in Tagore meant nothing but stripping!

The sexual revolution in Q's film is further tarnished by the inanity of the revenge motif smuggled into the narrative. The director's fantasmatic split reinforces a unitary authorial consciousness on the work which Tagore's play in my mind only tries to undermine. Perhaps the film tries to do the same by having Joyraj as both the decadent director and the King of the card species but for me the doubling does not work and the frame narrative still looks jaded; this stupid romanticisation of the Bengali intellectual as a failed pyjama-clad, side-bagged geek is done to death and simply intolerable! In general I think the film tried to do a bit too much and the intended esoteric often bordered on intellectual pretence, one-upmanship on Tagore and a muddled stunt of over-signification.

On the plus side, I did think some of the images were arresting enough in their painting like evocations, the surrealist motifs were overdone but on occasions they did leave an impression; the table tennis sequence at the beginning was interesting; they tried to do the text in a very 'theatrical' way often indulging in a rehearsal-like repetition and throw of dialogues; the decision to alienate and 'minorize' Bengali language by making non-native speakers speak different Bengalis was an interesting performative choice and I did think that it contributed to the humanisation of the mechanical card language with the accents stumbling and tottering instead of flowing seamlessly. Performance wise Joyraj and the lady who played the queen in the human world were impressive.

In Q's rendering, if the dream world of cards is all law and no eros and to humanise that world, one has to 'sexualise' it, the question crops up if sexual instinct can be the definitive human trait? What about the non-human animals? This would mean that the dream world is 'sexless' and simply mechanical while for me what Tagore implies is not this kind of simplistic compartmentalisation but a complex interweaving of the erotic and the machinic qua the human!

Is it 'I fuck therefore I am human' and otherwise I am a machinic face of law?

What about the law of sexuality itself?

In this way, one law will only replace another and to see this as man's 'revenge' (or the prince's revenge on behalf of his mother in true blue Manmohan Desai style) makes it even more ludicrous!

Tasher Desh is an absolutely brilliant work by Tagore and Q's meddling is way too overambitious and flat!

Snippets on Cinema 1: Meghe Dhaka Tara

Finally watched Kamaleshwar Mukherjee's Meghe Dhaka Tara. A lot has been written on it; I would simply like to make one point.

I think the film contains an extremely dangerous portrait of Ritwik Ghatak as an artist because wittingly or unwittingly it ends up showing his cinema and his entire aesthetic practice as an extension of his clinical condition of depression. To centre his biopic on the mental hospital phase is one thing and to depict his entire thinking, the cinematic included, as an outward projection of his delusions is another!

It is such an unfair, diluted, if not outright stupid portrayal of the great director and the aesthete.

Let me clarify again to avoid confusion that I have nothing against the conception of 'psychic cinema' vis a vis Ghatak because one can find grounds for this kind of take in his case but what I fiercely oppose is the film's propensity to locate his cinematic flair entirely within the delusional structure of his clinical depression.

It's high time we get out of this inane stereotyping in which Ritwik Ghatak as a mad drunkard scores over the great creator he is, just like Binay Majumdar whose poetic self still remains secondary to his identity as someone's jilted lover gone mad!