The Excavated Imprints of the Interior World
Read Full Review at Dispatches Poetry War
Abstract:
Here’s my journey for excavation into ‘Antarlok’ (Interior World) – A prose collection written by the poet Alok Sarkar. The journey through this excavation process has created the space for me to reconstruct my own poems in an internalized language. When I read a poetry book, if the poem triggers me, if I can assimilate the original poems in my way of realization, then I can construct my own poem from the original one. In this process deconstruction comes into play first. Then I spread the assimilated feelings in a continuum of my own way of life and construct my own poem with an internalized language. This process demands a lot of space in the original poem. In the process of reviewing Sarkar’s book, I wrote these poems, with a structure of combination of prose and verse. It’s a void magic with sunlit absence. Some imprints piled up in the exterior of action, in the interior of reaction. I start Conversation with the excavated imprints. Alternatively I could say I start engaging words to my feelings. Sometimes the words are word-illusion of me, sometimes of the poet. I don’t want any wall in between. Walls can’t be marked by water, there’s only engraving. An engraved wall is a history and I’m not writing a history anyway. I just want to implant words in my moments; the moment which is the indistinct whistle of nocturnal language; the moment which is the reflected light of the lost dew; the moment which is the unheard music of silent tears.
At the very beginning let me present few gems and jewels of the ‘Interior World’ in the voice of the poet Alok Sarkar:
‘If we don’t think, nothing is getting importance in any direction. In this type of inattention all sides are getting filled with the words of unopposed modest spontaneous happening, for that there was no desire also, not even a wait. That means life cycle is according to rules. That is a wordless imageless white – these are such a fragrance that they don’t have any closeness or distance, which is only an existence, like an uncertainty of one and ten wet fields. Or it doesn’t have any existence, an untiring non-debatable certainty.
We pray for this permanence, the awakened sleep inside colourless, nondirective, permanent living– an indistinct silent prayer. And the noiseless, speechless, imageless right hand stands in front of us with expanded five fingers. It’s also cloudless sky of one and ten fields. And this life cycle is a life-stream inside sleep, inside uproar – inside the ups and down of home, family, going and return – all are certain. In front of it the infinite certainty, one and ten fields with expanded fingers. (P-198) (Translated by Reviewer)
The interior world is created by digging the inner-home of the sunlit absence. I start digging one and ten fields of interior bit by bit. Lots of grains piled up on my palm. Oblique light gets reflected from the particles. Turning the particles I track their displacement and trace their imprints.
Imprint-1: Corona on the finger of realization. It’s a message-rich invitation. The symbol has been kept in aloof plantation. It’s opening the loop of mystery in the dark cave of progressing inscription.
Imprint-2: The dark face on the back of untouched light. The face swings in a confusion of interior and exterior. Swing at the root of dilemma. Light… non-light…
Imprint-3: A circular unlimited flight. Imprint of future path flies away. Weep of art-stream in the hint, a solitary reading of the refracted path.
Imprint-4: A continuous ablution inside the sunlit absence, inside the non-existing totality. What a weightless diction, silent invocation!
Imprint-5: Meaning of action sits in the pronoun of creation. There’s a chain-breaking warrant, the right to build a new one, an expectation of perfection in meditative motion.
Imprint-6: There’re signs of non-home in the home’s interior. It’s designing an effortless motion, from going to non-going, from return to non-return, in the nascent state of denial.
Imprint-7: A canvas of light. But the light is absent in non-question, in wonder, in silence.
Imprint-8: Dark trip by opening the delusion of light. The alternate world is blossoming at the incoherent steps. No rhythm. No sequence. No rules too.
Now I shall enter into the session of Conversation with the above excavated imprints:
Conversation with imprint-1:
The truth is hanging between answered and unanswered. What is its form? Or is it formless? Intimate comprehension is writing the elegy of form and formless. The question paper is difficult. Consciousness has been written but subject is missing. There’s a random accumulation of unselected, where only desire, nothing to achieve. What a wildcat desire!
Tables of my reason grope for the logic formula
An attentive position
Yet so insignificant
Seaming process of multi way analysis
looking for a definite ambience
according to rule
When I ask for an explanation
I reach the doorstep of experience
individual identity assembled on my palm
Again I entered into the reading enclave. An endless selection and rejection start. Inside the process whole is going towards being. Nonbeing is controlling it from the rear end. It’s a timeless endeavour. I go on groping the middle point between being and nonbeing. The whole giggles at me – looking for the true being?
In the endless cycle of reception and rejection
who is everlasting?
Truth is nowhere
More truth just born behind the truth
in a gradual nascent state
The scripts of non-attainment still stuck there
Notation of inherent melancholy
rings in the endeavour of receiving
Finger is wrapped with evening letter of gloomy world. On the cover of correspondence the pronoun of experience has set an endless stair. The spontaneous candour of living process is planting hesitation. I have to cross all the rectilinear utterance. I’m engraving my travel marks in the wonderland of simplicity. I need to go down the imperative stairs of realization… to the inherent way….towards the dark void.
Runa Bandyopadhyay 