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The Poetic Journey of Seshendra � My Husband

A writer has two lives, one is the physical life he is forced to lead through the many vicissitudes of daily routine and the other is his conscious inward journey on the level of the constant process of harmonizing the two worlds. For a sensitive, thinking individual the inward journey is more pronounced and forms the most important aspect of his living and thinking life which frequently supercedes the limitations with the limitations of his physical existence.

This process modifies the poet’s entire being and makes him stand apart from the rest of mankind. A poet’s thought undergoes a total transformation under the mandates of his inner world. He has in him an entire rebirth of curiosity. It is this second childhood that rises like a nascent sun and throws a new lustre on objects which now appear to him in their essential being. He then begins living in the world of essential beings which, in the common jargon of literature, are called symbols.

To me symbols are like mythological episodes, for instance the child �Hanuman� who tried to clutch at the rising sun and attempted to eat it thinking it is a fruit.

All mythology was born this way through the fresh, childlike vision of the sage and imp who transformed their inner worlds to invite upon themselves fresh births of great meanings which were woven into simple stories to be deciphered later by generations to come.

The inward poetic journey of Seshendra began quite early, when he was about twenty odd years. From then on, one can decipher each of his distinct periods of creativity and expression. Each major writer or poet has different periods in his creative journey. There is an early period of blossoming, then by the period of achievement and· sense of a spring-time, followed by the mature period of wisdom and poetic excellence combined with an eternal mental harvest. And finally if the poet is fortunate enough to live a complete cycle of life come his poems of vision and farewell.... this I call a total cycle of a poet’s journey, a total blossoming of a deep mental process, a symbolic journey which finds its fulfillment in complete creativity. A journey which has an abundance of gathering of symbols.

All through Seshendra’s life, man and nature have been the most provocative inspirations. These have vibrated in him at different levels of his consciousness and have given birth to some fascinating symbolic pictures.

As a person close to Seshendra, I shall take you into his creative world. Into the mysteries of the birth of his symbols. Once we were driving through the Bandipur forest. By evening everything around was still. Not even the footsteps of birds were heard. Overwhelmed by the quiet solitude of the moment between approaching dusk and day he wanted the car to be stopped. The black Mercedes swimming like a whale along the road came to a halt. Seshendra eagerly got out feeling the expanse of the forest with all his senses. He was there like one of those teak trees endeavouring to experience the complete feeling of being in the forest. He looked like having grown leaves and branches in order to experience the inconceivable taste and feeling of the sky and the forest at that moment. He hardly realized how time flew. However, when the first evening star appeared in the sky, I touched him in order to pull him out of his reverie and remind him that we had a long way ahead of us and that night was approaching.

I had only to touch him and he burst into a narration punctuated by silence. We could hear a soft cooing of the bird and the sound of a stream trickling down the mountain. The bird and the trickling stream calmed the agony which was consuming him. He said he was trying to touch and feel the contours of the experience of joy of being in a forest and to bring it down to the measure of physical existence which was all the time eluding the grasp of his senses. Therefore he had to become a tree, grow leaves and branches and then realized that with the chirping of the birds and the rippling of the mountain brook, the total experience of a forest could be measured. And the lines came:

I measure the forest with the song of a bird or with a meandering stream.

I was thrilled at the idea of his becoming a tree in order to grasp with his inner eye the experience of the forest. I asked him to record these lines in the compendium of his poetry notes which travel with us always like one of his limbs. For quite some time, even later, he actually felt like a tree and the symbol of the tree dominated his creative world for a period. Over time, I have gathered that he passes through different periods of domination. He was, once before that, under the domination of the symbol of the sun. Perhaps this happens in the case of all creative intellectuals, as we see in the case of Picasso’s orange, pink and white periods.

One day he suprised me by saying, �His people are beautiful wild animals that tear the flesh of the fruits with their teeth.� The episode he narrated was interesting. It appears he was lunching with a few friends at a restaurant. One of them picked up an apple and dug his wide teeth into the flesh of the fruit and the apple grimaced in pain, which Seshendra could feel. His friend had a plump face and his eyeballs were hidden in layers of fat. His whole face showed lines of the animals in man. Then he thought ‘the animal in man is cruel�. Now perhaps while returning home he must have dwelt over the scene:

Where my people wander on the sandy beaches in gay abandonment, tear the flesh of fruits with their teeth and prowl like beautiful wild animals.

There are certain things I shall always remember. One morning, clouds had touched Paris somberly. The trees down the road of Arc de Triomphe were as if racing away to catch up with everybody’s dreams. We walked into the Louvre and were confronted with a large figure of Venus de Milo in the middle of an arch with light flooding onto her face, stripping her nudity to the very edge of her skin. Her eyes were so magnetic that Seshendra stood before her enthralled.

He searched her face for those gems which must have been embedded in her eyes once and wondered what colour they could have been? Brown, green or blue? He remained in a half daze the whole day.

From this emerged the glorious poem “You� of Seshjyotsna.

A poet, in the moment of the birth of a symbol, is in a state of mind where his physical world and his dream world, into which he lapses, keep playing with each other, overlapping one another and when they finally melt into each other the symbol rises like a Venus from the depth of the poet’s inner sea. I can easily imagine that this is what happened to Seshendra, the poet, as he stood before the sculptured marble of Venus de Milo, losing himself entirely in her:

Those supreme eyes, your eyes shimmer as two pieces of broken sky, two blue birds, two blue black sapphires about to take wing.

It was another such moment, a long way from Paris, in Italy this time. The sun was setting between the old arches on near the Hotel Excelsior where we stayed. Rome had gone a beautiful soft mauve. The evening light was so diffused that it seemed like a blush on the city. It was cold and the sun was red as a plum. The arches grew darker and darker. The trees faded out along with the avenues and the sun just hung there like a red lantern. He looked at me and I smiled. That moment is immortalised in the same poem “You�:

O Roman sun, in your murderous red blood Michaelangelo dipped his vibrant brush. Don’t you hear the cries? Rome still weeps an agony of colour.�

At times I feel he has an obsession; a Baudelairean storm rages in his innermost depths, not apparent to others except to those who know him well. I hear him frequently mentioning the far off islands in the Pacific full of swaying coconut palms and feel Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, an adolescent dream that still remains deep in his subconscious. Thereafter he wrote a line in his exuberance of love and said from the depths of his soul:

Where I, the storm fled away from the oceans, take shelter in the coconut groves of your bosom. (My Country, My People, Canto II)

Just like a miner, who tunnels into the depths to find deposits of precious ore, so too, it is not without excitement and a fresh wonder, that you go into his experiences.

The first lines of his modern epic My Country, My People rose from the coils of his mind like a full-hooded cobra hissing out the total power of a dawn; the lines see the glorious image of the eternally toiling human hand in the ever-rising orb of the sun. Both combining the steady rise of mankind into great civilizations and culture through the sanctity of labour. This is the one Everestian symbol from which his entire stream of consciousness flows down and floods the pages of his magnum opus with a plethora of images and living pictures. The birth place of this interesting symbol was a room overlooking the Dam at Krishnaraja Sagar Hotel, Mysore. Seshendra was still in bed-drinking in the dawn with his half-awake eyes. He was preoccupied with the idea of civilization and it was waiting to catch the most striking symbol from where he would unfold his inner theme of culture, civilization, time and man. So it came to be that one morning, one sacred morning:

A hand rises out of the dawn, the hand of the toiler of time, it is raised dipped in the blood and sweat of human fields.

There are a hundred incidents like this, which I could go on narrating exposing his mental journey to you that will have to be in the form of a book which I hope to write one day. Here I give you just a few glimpses into the poetic journey of Seshendra, about how he captures these elusive symbols for his works. These instances will reveal to you only limitedly the process through which a mature poet lives and how this living poetry is made. Living poetry is not made by taking a great line of another poet. It is not worthy of a real poet, for he has not lived it, it has been lived by somebody else. The real poet excavates poetry out of his environment, chisels it with the tools of his mind and gives it to you like a special gift carved out of his being.

Creativity is a unique moment in a poet’s life. A poet’s life, ultimately, is only the stringing of these intensely lived moments and, the rest one can say, is not his real life.

� Courtesy ‘Indian Literature� � Sahitya Akademi, Delhi.