‘The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind’: A landscape of feelings in Avinash Shrestha’s poetry

Final as marble
your absence will sadden other afternoons.

— Jorge Luis Borges, from “Parting”

Avinash Shrestha’s collection of poetry The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind translated from the Nepali into English by Rohan Chhetri evokes a landscape of feelings that translates the outside/outer into the inside/inner.

The very first poem, “Relative”, is a vertigo of paradoxes. The mountain cliffs appear “more beautiful” than flowers, thorns appear “more sorrowful” than colours, the heart is “higher” than butterflies and birds, and suddenly, before you realise it, the poet is caught in the folds between night and darkness. The passing of time registers the landscape of experience.

In the poem “Metamorphosis”, Shrestha transforms into a sea after waking up from the arms of a river. He spent the night as a caterpillar to be transformed into a butterfly in the afternoon. A feather waiting to be a bird, a seed waiting to give birth to a god, the poet is only briefly being what he is, always looking to become something else.

In the poem, “Greed”, someone or something seek-able is lodged in the recesses of the heart. The poet is led by paths that impersonate the sought-after object, trailed by many deaths, in the hope of a meeting. The object “you” may not be someone or something external, but within. Who is the “you” in poetry?

The figure of ‘you’

The 20th-century Spanish poet Antonio Machado plays with the illuminating paradox between “I” and “you”. In his famous poem, “Proverbs and Song-Verse” (dedicated to the Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset), Machado writes in fragment XXXVI: “It’s not the basic I / that the poet is after / but the essential you.” A little further in fragment XLII he evokes Christ’s ethical precept of loving the neighbour as other: “Christ teaches love your neighbour / as yourself. But never forget / he is someone else.” And in the next fragment, Machado reiterates: “He spoke another truth: / find the you that is never yours / and can never be.” Even further, in fragment L, Machado writes: “That you in my song / doesn’t go for you, friend. / That you is me.” The deeper self is the elusive neighbour within us. Seeking the neighbour is to seek a contrarian being who keeps us restless by being contrarian. In the last poem of the collection, “Fragments”, Shrestha evokes the “You” twice, and in the fragment ‘The Other’, he exactly echoes Machado: “There’s someone else / that walks beside me / a fellow traveller”.

Human beings (are willing to) die for the desire to be united with the other half, to meet (and mate with) the other. Shrestha writes in the same poem,

“In the blue darkness there is 
an apparition of you 
You – to arrive at the edge of you
my one birth will not do.”

The figure of the “you” takes on cosmic proportions, it is light years away, and one life is not enough to even reach its doorstep. To be I is to be born into a fundamental paradox: I is not enough without you, and you are a desire, a question, an ache, a fear, a terror that I must seek to embrace, to understand, in order to fulfil the restless state of being I. You and I are conjoined by a conjunction – you and I – but we are also separated by it. To refer back to Machado’s fragment L: My song is about me, not the easily identifiable, representable you. The you in me is not you but me in the sense that the you I seek is un-representable.

The element of time is always mysteriously, surreptitiously present in the game between I and you, between being and becoming. The poem “Song of the Five Elements” begins:

“The birds flew towards the sky 
and became sky 
Wild beasts that ran with the speed of wind
became wind itself
Humans rolled over the dirt 
and became earth 
The fish darted restlessly in water 
and became water”

Beings get dissolved, or transformed, into things they encounter in their act of being. You run to become wind, roll on earth to become earth, and swim to become water. To act is to turn oneself into metaphor, to be claimed by what you touch and feel and experience as a body. The body is not just what it is, but what it becomes in the moments of encounter. In such moments, we experience that the body is the encounter. It occupies space within other spaces.

In the poem, “Encounter”, the post-war Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz writes,

“O my love, where are they, where are they going  
The flash of hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. 
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.”

— Wilno (1936)

These moments and acts of dissolving, transforming, disappearing, are marks of time and mark time in turn. In fact, the phenomenology of time accounts for such experiences where we feel time in our consciousness and our body as something tangible. Experience is touchable time. But as Milosz’s poem reminds us, the fleeting experience of time is not graspable. It remains elusive, where the element of sadness is overcome by an even more powerful realisation of strangeness. Fleeting time is sorrowful because it reminds us of – throws us back to – our mortality. But what is this time that produces sorrow? This question has provoked many answers, but the question persists in the cosmic emptiness.

There is a delicious twist at the end of Shrestha’s poem:

“But the poet – / neither ready to be a bird / nor fish / neither ready to be human / nor dirt / Became – / a sigh / an intimation / a cipher.”

Autonomy in the poet

Shrestha introduces a sense of autonomy in the poet. Even though the theatre of transformation, or metamorphosis, involves a state of becoming whose dark stage is the unconscious, it is preceded by an act of the will. The poet allows himself this uncanny experience. The sense of autonomy exemplified in the will is however a negative one: the poet is not yet ready to become something else, or something other. It is a moment, an act of hesitation. The poet inhabits a space at the precipice of experience. Autonomy is also an act that dictates the relationship between self and time. The not-yet-ready poet shall choose his time to become other. If experience is a slippage into the unknown, it undergoes an autonomous moment when the poet wills it. This negative will mired in hesitation can end in failure. The poet can remain stranded in transit, an unfinished gesture (or, breath) caught in the passage of time, what does not fully translate into what for Paul Celan meant “a turning of our breath”. Shrestha’s will is mid-breath.

It is keeping the motif of transformation in mind you can read the horse in the poem as Shrestha, the jungle as Shrestha, the Brahmaputra as Shrestha, the Santhal woman Nayantara Barua as Shrestha, who is both desiring and failing to be other, as much as the other fails to be him. Poetry flows “in the massive channel between us” as Shrestha writes in the poem, “Of Some Unidentified Village, Nayantara Barua”, in memory of the Nellie Massacre in Assam during the winter of 1983.

On a rare occasion, the act of poetic transformation takes on an intense field, like in the poem, ‘Blues’, where the music turns everything black, every cord of feeling is touched by black despair. Music offers a more palpable route towards what is universal and other and the same time, infused with a doubleness of experience.

The Dust Draws its Face on the Wind is a rich set of poems revolving around the poet’s constant efforts to stalk the language of becoming other things.

An accomplished young poet in English, Rohan Chhetri gives lyrical shape to Shrestha’s poems. It is difficult to make a critical remark on Chhetri’s translations without knowing of the Nepali language. Yet, the lyric moves of the original seem to be well rendered in English. The lack of punctuation marks opens up delightful spaces for reading. The sparseness of poems like “Poet’s Work” written in a series of fragments offers Haiku-ish moments of wonder and reflection:

“Milk 
from the firmament 
music of dead silence. 

Receive in words 
What is wordless.”

The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind, Avinash Shrestha, translated from the Nepali by Rohan Chhetri, HarperCollins India.