Madness and the art of a Bengali poet

One of the romantic roots of anti-art, says the Belgian art critic Thierry de Duve, the idea of the alienated artist, stands and accounts for a paradoxical sensus communis, which runs against the bourgeois common sense – the bohemian, the lumpen, the socially deviant. Combined with this taste, the irrational power of the unconscious is supposed to affirm the liberating potential of everyone except the “bourgeois,” a conviction that the secrets of the most exceptional creative talent has to be sought in neurosis and nonsense, the most common fate of common man. Naturally, art turns more to be a matter of discontinuity and hesitation on the part of the sufferer rather than about language, reification or craft.

The marginal artist not only distinguished himself thus from the bourgeoisie but also placed himself at a slight angle to the righteous idea of human progress per se. For, both these categories – human and progress – are external to art and life, they would believe. The ironic redefinition of the romantic self then would turn out to be the personal “art coefficient” which is in an arithmetical relationship between the “…unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

This later romantic re-appropriation of the very idea of the sublime in art was necessary because the magisterial judgemental horizons of Immanuel Kant would bristle and not allow certain key emotional categories to be part of the domain of the aesthetic: disgust and ridiculousness being two prime examples. Anger could be another pariah, though, unlike the other two, Kant had a crafty way of sneaking anger into aesthetics without making that outré and subversive.

The result is often that instead of creating benchmarks of counter-judgment from within literary and artistic endeavors and movements, one ends up valorising external conceptual and philosophical attributes in trying to chart the power and sublimity in works of forms of art that can take on the reigning arbitrations on art at a particular moment of time. One keeps on making the classic romantic folly of celebrating the misunderstood, mad artist who stands up against sanity, proportion and balance in artistic endeavours. Needless to say, such an idea of literary enthusiasmos goes back to Plato’s Phaedrus and Ion.

Since a long time, exactly such a fate has befallen the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar.

Surely and gradually he has been made more important than his works. And the most sought after reclusive, neurotic traits have been attributed to his persona which elides into any and every evaluation of his poetry. Nothing could be more maudlin and melodramatic. This is a hindrance for evaluating the sheer force of his poetry. He was a consummate and conscious craftsman. Through and through.

In fact, poetry is journal writing for Majumdar, more so at the later stages of his life. He looks at objects and happenings around himself and keeps on recording. The result is that, at one level, we discover a careful chronicler who captures the minutia of a world that lies outside of the bustle of Calcutta. The lines are remarkable journalistic and shorn of all embellishment until one notices that sparseness has been used masterfully in order to give us an insight into something much more fundamental: living itself. Recording means looking closely at the relationality and texture of things.

In fact Majumdar was quite conscious about art and elimination. Time and again he would cite from painting modernist paintings and Jibanananda Das in order to highlight the virtues of eliminating brush strokes and metaphors, so that the mysterious nature of life does not get fully revealed and yet does not turn into mystical and other-worldly. In a detailed discussion of Das’s poetry, he has meticulously shown how the poet moves progressively from simile to symbol to analogy. Such a process of gradual substitution is also at the heart of his own craft. (Nebulous Jibanananda)

It is the political necessity of the hour to reclaim Binoy’s works as keen extensions of the counter-romantic – a sunken-subterranean mode that constantly undercuts the romantic-neurotic and the modernist-ironic in our living.

Casual cruelty, a motif

“when I was in Ezra hospital
some would call me mad
at night Paramesh and Uma Dasgupta would come, ready with choppers
I told them: don’t you see it’s written ‘asylum’ on the door?
If you kill and eat my meat you too will turn mad
every night such things will happen
then they stopped chopping me.”

— "In the Hospital"

Everyone passes through the mad house of our existence. That is the default state. Not because we are mentally irrational beings but because killing and eating human meat is always a possibility. We teeter at the edge. At every waking moment we are being casually cruel with our fellow beings. That is what defines our special status as guardians of asylums and the socias as such. We are chopping ourselves, our own restlessness and flight, to pieces so that we can remain relevant.

It is not our mental state that decides our sanity but the surface of our existence – in this case dealing in “meat” at which point morality, disguised as cruelty, resides. There is a drab systematic routine to this cruelty – for that happens every night. Unfailing. But such is our arrogance that the moment we are shown that chopping of our ego is actually equivalent to cannibalisation, that moral buggery is actually cannibalisation of our souls, actuated through the flesh, we retract and refrain. We bristle at the very thought and begin playing the sublimity game. And that fellow feeling routine returns.

It is impossible to romanticise this state of existence. And to humanise it through the aesthetic, through poetic adornment, is to act the savior, from a distance – in Joyce’s words “...refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” One possible option is to jump headlong into the sumptuousness of life. And seek an original equivalence in creation and destruction alike. Majumdar takes that option seriously.

The poet reserves an acute sense of his own alienation but does not allow wallowing in its sentimentality. There is toughness and nonchalance in Binoy that is not the typical modernist detachment. It is not an anthropological interest in ones surroundings. Every object, every encounter is a shining, poetic. It is a craft but not studied. Art is also acceptance of finitude, another path to conserve life’s encounters. One records and moves on.

It is again played out by a self-reflection on his own predicament – his cult status and his trajectory as a being of an object exhibition himself. His dull pain of oracular status gets exposed sharply. Again through periodic displays of cruelty. This attribute, most tellingly, he extends to his fellow poets themselves and then to human beings in general. The whole poetic confraternity is taken apart as being as vulnerable and ruthless as any other.

“they used to celebrate by birthday a few years ago
Amalendu Biswas, the editor of Nouka Patrika and his friends
Aajkal announced: 17th September poet Binoy Majumdar’s birthday celebrations at Simulpur – come one, come all!
poetry sessions and food, yes lots
but some would make sure I heard when they discussed how many times I was put in the asylum
this used to sadden me
so, I do not allow my birthday celebrations anymore
celebrating my birthday has come to an end.”

— "Born in the Milky Way"

And then the extension:

“with some poets Bengalis have been exceptionally cruel
and will continue to be so in future
when Rabindranath was on his death bed and could not move his fingers
Bengalis demanded he must craft a poem and recite too
so that somebody could take notes
so, Rabindranath recited and a listener took down his words
that was Rabindranath’s last poem.”

— "It Happens With Some Poets"

Fraternal cruelty is a primitive relational ritual. It is extracted of poets too. By their kinsfolk. The very idea of the celebration of birthdays is a ritual so that we can participate in methodical cruelty and humiliation of our friends. Especially those whom we decide to bring within the communitarian cycle. And call friends. It is most telling indictment of the romantic cult of the genius.

In the first case, the idea of sharing comes from celebrating the anomaly of the poet as a neurotic genius. That is the reason that friends and fellow poets have travelled from Calcutta – to remind themselves and the poet that he is a genius since he has been in asylums. He has passed the ritualistic test of being a visionary. And he has to be reminded of his abjectness and sublimity every passing year on a particular date.

In the second case, cruelty is manifested in the form of extracting the maximum out of the oracular, reciting voice of Rabindranath. Poetry, in this case, becomes sacrosanct words of wisdom – bani – that needs to be milked from the genius. A poet whose lifelong endeavor had been to question our sense of mutability, is by one fell swoop, turned into a wisdom spewing automaton who can perhaps give us one more instance of his inspired vision before he vanishes past us.

Our sense of disgust is so sharply made ironic in these spare words and ridiculousness of visualizing the poet as a seer is punctured so thoroughly that it is impossible to either take a transcendental supra-sensible route to sublime poetry nor is it possible to celebrate the tortured, insane sufferer of an artist. The polar opposition between art and anti-art is being spliced open by Binoy.

The logic of naked truth of life can be accepted only with an equanimity that is supremely and finally based on encounters with other matter, other bodies. Deeply invested encounters these are. Such encounters cannot be emotionally naïve. One has to appreciate the logic of inevitability of life; not to give life too long a rope. Nor restrict its scope. One has to realise the inevitability of all that happens. That is all. Life is an extraordinary assemblage of opulence that art could keep on recording.

A theme is opened up. That whatever must constitute as art must have two components. First, that it must record the relational nature of our historicity which is also cosmological in scope. And two, that art is less of a furor and more of looking at and through objects differently and afresh, with a certain clarity that aspires to destroy our ordinary sense of clarity. Such clarity is not the vision of the seer but the fruits of the experiences of the toiling, laboring, suffering artist working within his milieu.

This is a crucial time for poetry.

And for art in general. Especially since we are now temperamentally besieged by the populist-nativist on one side and the vacuous cosmopolitan one the other. Such dangerous banalities are no options, of course. The trouble is that ideas of resistance or solidarity in and through art practice have gradually been drained off their sheen.

The idea of anti-art has had its day until it has been sublimated within the routine through populist ventures, ethical inwardness or nihilist overtures. On the other hand a creeping formalism is making a return that would ruthlessly reassert values of artistic sublimity as the gold standard, as always, with no social or material-cosmological concern whatsoever. One can take some heart from a keenly observant counter-romantic who used to limn his leaps and limits with a rare clarity:

“it is not good to note down that in the Thakurnagar market
there are many tea-shops; these tea-shops of the universe
I witness from a distance; do not venture inside
to these tea-shops many people routinely come and chat, I see
those who come for a chat in these tea-shops of the universe
I speak with them though, outside of the shop
I say ‘bhai how are you, how have you been bhai?’
I tell such things to the people of this universe.”

Opulence lies all around us. Keep away from all dross. Doggedly.

Excerpted with permission from The Opulence Of Existence: Essays on Aesthetics and Politics, Prasanta Chakravarty, Three Essays Collective.