It is not true that one can create an illusion of humility;
the membrane is so thin that the world will see through the facade It is not
possible to divorce us from what we voice and write. They are our selves-good
or bad, acceptable or outrageous, humorous or livid.
In times gone by when I was young, avenues to see one’s
thoughts in print was rare and success- an achievement as scaling the Everest, possible only to the very few who
succeed after relentlessly posting in the mail the works they pen- essays short
stories, poems ,so on and so forth to publishing houses, newspapers and
periodicals. In fact there were no boulevards that one could trod through to
air one’s thoughts. The virtual age has revolutionised all that. And it will be
sheer untruth to claim that what we write on our blog, be it as a post or
comment is not us speaking, our psyche, our experience and they are only
pertaining to aliens or we speak for the reader. Else one must admit that one
is a common hypocrite who wants to influence and sway people with clichés like “awe”,
“awesome” etc.
An ode to melancholy cannot be penned in an elated state.
One has to be feeling sad to write about being sad. Can I say that my poem, my essay
are not my thoughts but of my neighbour? It is only when one empathises with
the misfortunes of the neighbour or when one is consumed by one’s own misfortunes
does the ode to melancholy bears. A man like Mukesh Ambani sitting in the ugliest
mansion ever built to desecrate the Mumbai skyline cannot possibly pen or be
enchanted by the lines of William Wordsworth
“I
wandered lonely as a cloud
That
floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all
at once I saw a crowd,
A host,
of golden daffodils;
Beside
the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering
and dancing in the breeze.”
I’m not an afficando of poetry but I
understood that the language of John Keats lines
'Yes, I
will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind'
can be
linked to his love letters to Fanny Brawne.
Keats penned one of his famous five odes , “Ode to a Nightingale”,
one spring. He felt immense tranquility and happiness in the song of the little
bird that nested near his house. He went out sat beneath the tree for hours and
thence was born one of the most beautiful odes. What other state of mind other
than sheer joy and tranquility can provoke such a creation? A paranoid mind
cannot hear nor see the nightingale.
Take these lines of P.B.Shelly:
My heart
aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Oh! lift
me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall
upon the thorns of life! I bleed!'
The poet evinces his aching for rebirth and resurrection. He
wants to be as 'timeless, fleeting and lofty' as the West Wind, for he suffers
endlessly. The intense emotional distress of the unforgiving life makes him bleed-the
life experiences ('I fall upon the thorns of life') and longs to put an end to
the agony. I do not think that Shelly would have felt offended or ashamed at
this dissection of his verses.
Can one say that the lines were all in humour and jest?
There is always our pale self in our words and writings even if we consciously
want to camouflage or deny that. One need not be a Maugham or a James Joyce,
but life’s experience is in our words and writings.
Hemmingway’s candid
painting of life as seen and experienced by him created the unique literature
that give us immense pleasure. Hemmingway’s life and his writings are entwined
and are mirror images. “Death in the afternoon”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
both vivid narration of his love- bullfighting and his experience in the Spanish
Civil war, then “The Old Man and The Sea” are undeniable exposition of human
relationships, emotions, love, agony, lust and disappointment. Imagine Papa
Hemmingway creating “Snows of Kilimanjaro or the Green Hills of Africa if he were
a reticent and incipient arm chair explorer? The throbbing emotions packed in
the “Snows of Kilimanjaro” would certainly have touched Hemmingway as an experience
felt or seen in some ways.
It is life that make a writer or a poet, Mark Twain,Hemmingway
or the Bloggers like us and there is no infamy in not being timid and to accept
that our words in letters are our life- humour, jest, agony, joy or stoicism.The opposite is sheer malarkey.