Poised Between Contraries: Ram Krishna Singh’s Silence: White Distrust

 

Poised Between Contraries: Ram Krishna Singh’s Silence: White Distrust 

                                                                         ---Basudhara Roy 

 

Can mental spaces engage in a chromatic dialogue? Can colours be narrativized? Can contrary impulses generate a meaningful conversation? Is it possible to find a poetic rhythm for the darkening world that has been ours ever since the Covid-19 pandemic set in? As crisis follows crisis in these difficult times and existent words recurrently fall short of expressing new, unimagined realities, one wishes one had something more concrete than language to work with and cast one’s feelings immortally to memory. “Language in art,” says Harold Pinter, “remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which may give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.” For poet-academic-critic R.K. Singh too, truth-seeking is a responsibility that cannot be shrugged off by the committed artist, no matter how difficult the trials faced. In Silence: White Distrust, the poet attempts the daunting creative challenge of forging a new poetic rhythm to express the new pandemic experience of disillusionment, fractured chronological time, acute biological consciousness and an alienating isolation from the social world. What is remarkable is that the attempt, besides meeting unquestionable success, reaches into the depths of philosophical questioning to offer new perspectives on life and the potential of the human mind to map its paradoxes.

In his Introduction to the collection, the poet writes:

Covid-19 lockdown has been a physically, mentally and emotionally challenging experience. Living in isolation inconstant fear, suffering strict social and personal distancing, there has been a gradual rise of ‘distrust' in all that was positive, self-regulating, and internally strengthening or uplifting. My silent reflections within, and observations without, exposed to me my personal, as well as socially larger, loss of hope and faith that embed spirituality. I noticed the trend in my recent poetic expression and discovered that it was possible to develop a new collection of poems with a thread of silence and distrust running through it. It also seemed possible to do a long experimental haiku-tanka-haiku linked verse….

The entire collection is composed in the fabric of a linked haiku-tanka-haiku sequence that not only appears to replicate the experience of pandemic slow time but conjures in sincere, heartfelt rhythms the despondency and sanitized silence of our days. Singh’s poetry, as one reads through it, records the minutiae of our everyday lives with infallible accuracy and stark realism. Strewn across it are familiar landmarks of desire, unfulfillment, waiting, conjecture, failure, disappointment and loss. Singh’s evocative imagination finds powerful metaphors for emotional states in the most mundane objects of our daily world – “empty chairs”, “stain-dried lingerie”, “spiders' network/ between two photo frames”, “broken bangles”, and “the city’s garbage”. The observations are neither extraordinary in themselves nor worth pondering over out of context. But through their rare felicity of association in Singh’s poetry, they derive a potency that transforms them into three-dimensional architectural images of memorable strength and beauty.

Throwing light on the significance of his title, Singh writes, “Silence is positive; White too has positive connotations, but Distrust is negative. White Distrust is ironical; it is a harmless fib. There is no moralizing, lecturing, or teaching.” The idea, one realizes, is to sketch experience sharply poised between contraries. On the one hand is the overwhelming regime of silence with its epistemological, creative and poetic possibilities. On the other, however, is the constant and poignant sense of distrust that inhibits the mind from settling down comfortably into this space of silence. Here is a vivid and vibrant interaction of two opposing modes of feeling – silence with its connotations of fertility, expansiveness, absorption, acquiescence and peace, and distrust with its echoes of interruption, destructive questioning, faithlessness and disjunction. The accomplishment of the book rests on the delicate but firm balance established between these powerful opposing emotional forces. It is to Singh’s immense credit as a poet that he never disregards the unspectacular truth to conquer the glamorous falsehood and allows them both to stand as they are, sans regret and sans illusion. In Silence: White Distrust, there is no obliteration of one category of experience by the other but rather, a unique expression of their cohabitation. If silence is spatial, distrust is projected as temporal so that the two remain ceaselessly poised in a perpendicular relationship, commenting and reflecting on each other through these monologic verses of confident elegance.

Silence, yes, but why distrust, one might be prompted to ask? Also, one wonders if these are entirely topical poems that derive their shape and sensibility from the context of the difficult pandemic? A close reading of the collection amply illustrates that the answers to both questions are linked. The distrust is dominant only because though appearing during the pandemic, these are not exclusively or merely pandemic poems. Born out of long drawn-out years of Singh’s constant poetic searching for permanent existential truths, these poems claim for their creative site, the ageing human body and a mind wizening towards omniscience. For Singh, the body through its needs, demands, rituals, illusions and fallibility, establishes itself as the most significant medium of experience. The fact of ageing and distrust of the body marks itself indelibly in these poems:

things get hairy, scary

with body failure

ailments pop up

spirit dries up

mind disconnects

 

 

hesitating

to take the first step through–

stands at the door

 

 

unhappy

with how I look and

feel right now

seek a best version

and just look within

 

It is worth noting how the spatial breaks in the poem underline the sense of disconnection, hesitation, faltering and repair. The rhythm is that of the colloquial, speaking voice and yet, the arrangement of the lines graphically on the page compounds its meanings manifold. “The white space between any two haiku and tanka adds to the sense of silence or peace,” explains Singh. “It adds to the sense of Meditation too. The verses become meditative as Silence is poetically and spiritually meditative, but its rhythm is disturbed by the rising feeling of Distrust.” Consider the following set:

earthy body

nights of silence

fear in mirror

return to the river

echoing hollowed sound

 

long waiting

short consultation–

ophthalmologist

 

 

morning smog–

an asthmatic with grandson

coughing restlessly

on the terrace even

a limping crow seeks fresh air

 

The fragility of the body is paramount here and yet, one realizes that this fragility is not only physical or individual. It is, in the larger sense, a condition and imperative of life itself, of the earth, of human myopia, and the thread of existence that inevitably runs from one generation to another. Even the mirror and the crow then, become a part of this uncertainty and distrust, reflecting it and responding to it. Consider again, the following set of poems:

pre-monsoon ramble

wilderness in harmony–

worlds within world

 

 

hail stones

lashing mango florets

my car too:

I fear thunder squall and rain

leaking roof and wetting bed

 

 

wild sugar cane

no animals savor

ageing monsoon

 

Here again, the poet leaves us amazed by the symbolic registration of the progress of time through telling images – pre-monsoon rambles, lashing mango florets and the ageing monsoon. The temporal pace of these poems  merits observation as the reader is constantly made aware of the steady flow of moments and seasons in a cyclical frame. Singh’s economy, terseness, sharpness, and precision of expression deserve special attention as does his mastery over poetic form. The haiku and the tanka are highly challenging poetic forms by reason of their sheer minimalism, their syllabic discipline and their ability to speak more only through less. Independent, self-referential and self-explanatory units of meaning and thought, the haiku and tanka demand a deep acquaintance with techniques of condensation, reflection, refraction and amplification.  The haiku-tanka-haiku sequence that Singh crafts in the book bespeaks volumes for his expertise and experimentation in minimalism, transforming the linked sequence into an evocative narrative of colour and a dense chromatic dialogue between the myriad hues of the mind. Each haiku and tanka has its own distinct subjectivity here as it formulates its personal perspective of the world. And yet, there is a strong etiological force spurring the reader on from one poem to another so that in its totality, the sequence acquires a grand epical quality and becomes a poignant litany for our times.

Tranquil yet restless, linear yet cyclical, multi-layered yet unified, fragmented yet compound, R.K. Singh’s Silence: White Distrust that includes a Spanish translation by Joseph Berolo, Bogota, Colombia, is a singular success in the poetic ambition of translating emotional colour into language and engaging contrary ideas in an insightful colloquy. Travelling through the piece which is now included in the poet’s latest collection Against the Waves: Selected Poems (New Delhi: Authors Press, 2021), is a journey through life’s outwardness into the deep, inward recesses of the self. As a reader and critic, one realizes that an encounter with this book shall remain memorable and worthy and that these poems shall continue to be valued both for their independent lustre and for the astounding brilliance that they impart to the unfathomable wisdom of life.

 

Reference:

Ram Krishna Singh. Silencio: Blanca desconfianza/ Silence: White Distrust (Spanish Edition).

Editorial Ave Viajera S.A.S.,  2021. ASIN (Kindle)  B08XWHTG19.

 

 

Published in Das Literarisch, Vol. 4, Issue 1, January-June  2021.

  

Lantern in the Sky: Spirit Behind Words

 

Lantern in the Sky : Spirit Behind the Words

 

-         Pravat Kumar Padhy

 

 

Prof. Ram Krishna Singh is a celebrated modern Indian English mainstream poet and has the credit of  being one of the finest haiku and tanka poets during the formative stage of development of the Japanese short forms of poetry in India. R K Singh has contributed a lot to popularize haiku-like short poems in India during the early seventies. Describing the essence of haiku, he suggests, “It is the spirit behind the words that counts: the pauses, hesitations, and the silences between words and between the lines, the silences that make a poem live and breathe. That is what makes a good haiku.”

 

In the present collection, Lantern in the Sky, titled from one of the haiku poems, the mélange of imageries of the personal experience, the human psyche, the celestial references, and the sense of gratification of divinity have been artfully portrayed. The collection includes the translation of haiku in French by Agouray Fatima.

 

“You are different by just being yourself. Close your mind. Close your eyes. See with your heart to feel what others can only see,” as Mahmoud Al-Rajabi aptly summarizes the essence of haiku in the Preface to the collection. The poet tries to image various spectrums related to nature entwined with emotion, love, grief, and zen-feeling  with spiritual pursuits. The collection  reveals references to vivid visual observations, from the sky to the hill, and the spider to the bees. He tries to render his observations into art-of-words,  leaving enough  space for the readers to unveil. It reminds us of  what Wordsworth calls “spot of time”, as the spontaneous reflection is seen in R K Singh’s haiku poems. At places, he is influenced by the philosophical aspects of Zen Buddhism.

 

Prof. Singh, with sharp craftsmanship, uses the haiku elements such as depth and mystery (yugen), contained space(ma), pathos (aware), becomingness (kokora), lightness(karumi), creativeness(zoko), elegance (fuga), and simplicity(iki) in a very thoughtful style. It is a delight to read the poems along with the splendid paintings of emitting the light of lantern up into the sky,  as if depicting energy and brightness associated with womanhood.

 

The poet deals with socio-economic issues with unequivocal imageries of searching for food by the dog and girl together! His poetic sincerity is reflected in correlating ‘frail back’ of the woman and ‘autumn evening’:

searching for food

in the street garbage

a dog and girl

 

***

a  load of wood

on her frail back –

autumn evening

 

He focuses his observation on a poor woman struggling to catch fish in exchange for some coins to buy milk for the new-born. In the following haiku, line 3 takes a different swing at the end to a deeper meaning. Here the ‘knee-deep’ can be correlated with the drying pond juxtaposing perhaps her lean health.

 

knee-deep in the pond

awaits fresh catch to buy milk

for the new-born

 

It reminds me of Tony Pupello’s essay ‘Voices: Poverty in Haiku’ citing  Richard Wright’s haiku, “I am paying rent/ For the lice in my cold room/ And the moonlight too.” Tony Pupelo writes, “Abject poverty, in my view is, precisely, a lack of choice. In a state of abject poverty there is no choice; there are no options. Without options, one finds oneself (or a family finds itself), trapped, a victim to whatever winds are blowing.”

 

R K Singh manifests the subtle expression of gracefulness and poetic sensitivity in the following haiku:

 

her fingers

I taste in the orange

she peels

 

There has been a close parallel in the aesthetic sense what Basho inks:

             

The butterfly is perfuming

Its wings, in the scent

Of the orchid. (Nishio, 379-80)

 

Poetry with honesty, depth, and mystery (yugen) has been beautifully crafted by R K Singh. In the following haiku he is awakened by the light of mystery and imagination of darkness. The use of  whites pace (ma), the dimension beyond the images, is meditatively displayed in the following haiku:

 

watching

the darkness between the stars

enlightenment

 

The contrast juxtaposition between the light of enlightenment and darkness between stars is a brilliant creation. Let us compare how splendidly Bruce H. Feingold  composes his monoku with insight: "letting out/ my breath/ a billion stars."

 

And visit the  mystic expression by Rabindranath Tagore in one of his epigrammatic expressions:

The stars of night are to me
the memorials of my day's faded flowers.

 

The ethical self-realization (zen feeling) symbolizes the essence of spiritualism. Rightly Blyth says, “haiku is a form of Zen”. R K Singh  writes poems embedded with a sense of ecstasy. According to the Pali canon, Harold Stewart opines, haiku as related to meditation, and says,“the longest process of consciousness caused by sense perception consists of seventeen thought-instants (cittakkhana) each briefer than a lightning flash”.

 

This evokes ethical goodness with a meditative tone and searching for the light of peace journeying through the infinite sky. Gracefully Singh pens:

 

on the river bank

his soul is lighted for peace—

lantern in the sky

 

His poems are often characterized by a sense of solitude (sabi) as he says, “awake/ alone on the house top/ a sparrow.”  He discovers the language of silence in a different orbit. I think it is not to exaggerate  to say about him, quoting Subramania Bharathi’s excerpt from the  article on “Japanea Kavidhai” (Japanese poetry)” in Swadesamitran  in its 16th October 1916 issue based on a haiku article written by Yonae Noeguchi in Modern Review, Calcutta: “The one who understands loneliness and silence and the language of the flowers and lives in oneness with nature is a poet.”  The poet deeply discovers the inner sense as he unfolds:

 

in silence

one with divine will

growing within

 

Let us compare the elegance of ‘silence’ in the manifestation of the celestial body (sun) by haiku Master, Buson, with that of (moon) by R K Singh  in the following haiku:

 

mist on the grass

on soundless waters

the sunset

 

The activity-driven poetic enchantment within the realm of silence (white space) has been wonderfully pictured by the poet:

 

drifting

in the night’s silence

moon’s shadow

 

Metaphorically he articulates the serenity when he opines purity has no shadow. It’s a brilliant search by the poet!

 

the sky

without a shadow

on the earth

 

The poet portrays the psychological tension of a man through complex imageries of unexpectedness (atarashimi) and drifting mood (nioi). One can closely observe the art of ‘leap’in the last line of the haiku:

 

prayer book

covering the glass—

his last drink

 

Jeffrey Winke pens, “Eroticism and haiku are a perfect fit. Just as the haiku is the art of indirection, so too erotica. Whereas the explicit is an imaginative endpoint, the best haiku are a suggestive starting point for the imagination.” Prof. Singh has pioneered in presenting romanticism with sensual touch in his mainstream poetry. Some of his haiku are entwined with sensual imageries depicting the human psyche. For him, love culminates into an inexplicable unification of souls embedded with sensory touch and romantic resonance:

 

touching her tattoo

in the darkness of mirror

moon from the window

 

***

tangle together

flames of a double lamp

on the terrace

 

One can observe a wide spectrum imagery of poetic elegance (miyabi) and intriguing  juxtapositions (renso) in his writings. R K Singh manages to sketch the beauty of the genre with the touchstone of creativity as he paints albeit  personification at a few places:

 

the clouds gather

over the hillock—

the air too turns black

 

***

float over the hill

the autumn circles of smoke—

her long hair streaming

 

Word phrases like ‘masks of happiness’,  ‘ blades of grass’, ‘long hair streaming’, ‘night’s silence’, ‘moon’s shadow’ etc have poetic resonance. Robert Spiess says, “A haiku lets things become what they are.” Touchingness of things (mono na aware) and touchingness of life (yo no aware) are the essences of haiku. Ram Krishna  Singh imbibes them and wishes to dwell in the present and in the instant moments of love, anguish, grief, despair, anger  with full sense of awareness,  as David Steindl-Rast writes: “the one basic condition of the human psyche that accounts for genuine happiness is living in the now.” There is an insightful testimony to it as I choose to conclude with my favourite haiku of R K Singh:

 

hitching up the skirt

she fills her pockets with

unripe mangoes

 

Works Cited:

 

Nishio. Haiku. The translated haiku is quoted from: R. H. Blyth, Haiku 4 (Tokyo, 1952): xxxiii, 321.

 

Singh, Ram Krishna. Lantern in the Sky. All the World E-Book Publishers, calameo.com, 2022.

 

Bio:

 

Pravat Kumar Padhy hails from Odisha, India. He holds a Masters in Science and Technology and a Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad. He has a certification of the Executive Education Programme on “Advanced Management” from IIM-Bangalore. His literary work cited in Interviews with Indian Writing in English, Spectrum History of Indian Literature in English, Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Poetry, Cultural and Philosophical Reflections in Indian Poetry in English, History of Contemporary Indian English Poetry  etc. His poetry won the Editors’ Choice Award at Asian American Poetry, Poetbay, Writers Guild of India and others. His poem, “How Beautiful”, published in 1983 in the leading Newspaper, Indian Express, has been included in the Undergraduate English Curriculum of Shivaji University, Maharashtra, India. He guest-edited the November 2019 Per Diem Column, The Haiku Foundation, on the theme, “Celestial Bodies”. He has seven collections of verse to his credits.

 

 

Published in Poetcrit , Vol. 35, No.2, July-December 2022, pp. 104-108 ; Also,

 

http://creationandcriticism.com/critique-lantern-in-the-sky-by-pravat-kumar-padhy.html