The Will to Live: Little Antidotes to Despair

 

The I in India and US

Poems by Llyn Clague

90 pages, $15.00

Pure Heart Press

 

A review by Christopher Bernard

Llyn Clague’s new book of poems is a charmer. It does what poetry, long expected to do, seems these days to do less and less: it tries to build a bridge – tenuous, delicate, easily breakable as it must be – between the individual and society at large, between the reader and the world.

…. Why

when it is so widely dismissed

as “all about me” – why poetry

about India?

…

… can poetry –

more allusive than analytic

daemonic than descriptive –

in flashes of India reveal landscapes

inside you?

Subjectivism has long been the presiding curse of modern poetry, to say nothing of modern culture, which has turned self-centeredness from the acme of sin into society’s prime motivator.

The philosophical roots of subjectivism go back to the idealism of modern thought, beginning with Descartes but finding its strongest support in Kant, who convinced many thinkers up to our time that “reality” is not directly accessible to us, that the only access we have is to the thoughts in our minds – although today even the word “mind” is suspect, and only “the brain” is scientifically correct, although even the doughtiest neuroscientist has yet to locate a thought in the brain.

Like many another discovery of the past several centuries, we may believe them only at the price of losing something of our sanity, morally, epistemologically, politically, culturally. (A paradox: the world that modern science reveals to us may in fact be, not only the “real” but the only world – yet knowing that, in a way that suggests the faustian aspects of our civilization, may also undermine the existence of the knower. You may have heard the one about Darwinism: we know it’s true, but only those who don’t believe it are having children. The belief in Darwinism looks more and more as though it may be maladaptive – and a belief in God, whether or not God actually exists, a prerequisite to human survival.)

Many of the Romantic poets took Kant’s theory to heart; in the generations that followed, it has become an article of faith of the intelligentsia, supported, apparently, by modern psychology, physics, neurology, even mathematics – as something that no one seriously questions, despite the pretense to “doubt everything” that is supposedly the modern intellectual’s sole moral imperative (“doubt everything except yourself,” of course). The result has been a massive descent by poets into the interiors of their own minds, in the desperate and despairing belief that that is the only truth they, and we, can ever know. This has led to many extraordinary poetic discoveries and inventions, but it is also, like the rest of modern civilization, clawing at the walls of a dead end. It is part of our current experiment in how many ways a civilization can commit suicide, to which it has made its own modest but notable contribution.

Clague’s poems, in their modest, quietly forceful way, are partly an antidote to the subjectivist despair. Many readers are aware of his political poems (full disclosure: I am co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector, and we have published a number of Clague’s poems, though none of the poems in this collection), so they will know that Clague is not content with Auden’s resigned assertion, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” which is tantamount to saying that people make nothing happen. Clague’s poems engage the world directly, with keen wit and a generous moral and political sensitivity to human suffering, joy and hope, and he clearly believes that poetry has a moral mission as well as an aesthetic one: its entertainments are part of its moral purpose, which is to build that ever-threatened bridge of understanding between human beings ever menaced by isolation and pointless suffering.

Clague’s book is a travelogue about three weeks he spent with his wife in India, and it revels in the inherent interest and excitement of travel, the fascination with a culture diametrically opposite (in appearance, at least) to one’s own, to the charms and frustrations of difference and “the other,” and their equally surprising similarities. He does not despair of reaching the other, as is sometimes found in more academic attitudes (another result of the long hangover of subjectivism), but he trusts himself enough to let himself feel and honestly speak out:

Midday mob

thick on the ground we

search for daily Uday

guide collect and count

push through the crush,

follow bags atop heads

weaving and bobbing

breathing rapid

out to the street past

upright beggars prone bodies

mother and baby on a sheet

cripple with flip-flop on a hand

another on an ankle rushing

forward useless legs

dragging on the concrete

 

He tells of a yoga course at an ashram. He describes the notoriously erotic temple at Kajuraho, and also its less well-known spiritual splendors. He describes the appalling and teeming wretchedness:

 

Tiny black hands clutch and dark like spiders.

 

Sitting in a large pile of cotton and rags,

two children grab globs of the white mass

and pack them in large bags,

snatch and stuff, snatch and stuff.

He visits organizations dedicated to helping the poor, and finds that sometimes they hate each other as much as the poverty they are both fighting:

 

I ask her view of the RDI.

Invisible, she snaps. I see absolutely nothing

of their work … her tone contemptuous.

 

He visits Bhopal, the Taj Mahal, a blur of monuments, a Gandhi shrine. He is taken by an American guide to a family home, probes the strange over-Americanness, the “innocent arrogance” (becoming less and less innocent in our monstrous century: the 20^th century began with 14 years of peace; the 21^st century with less than two) of the Americans there. He goes in search of the tiger in a nature preserve – and finds one. He almost drowns in a street of beggars and peddlers:

 

I want to scrape people

off my arms, shirt front, my face

I want space, openness, let me out

….

 

… I am screaming

I am in a swamp, a mire of humanity,

I am sinking … sinking …

people everywhere, pressing on me,

I’m suffocating …

 

In a flash I wonder,

is India not behind, catching up but ahead –

is this mass ….

…

where we are headed, both India and US?

 

He listens to the patient story of a young man, a runaway to New Delhi after growing up in a violent home (“One day I saw my father kill my mother”), taken in by a charity and now making his living giving guided tours of the city. And over and over, throughout the book, like a chorus, the strident honking and blaring of car, trucks, bus, bike –

 

Beep! Beep-beep! Bee-bee-beeeeeep!

…

Music of the road, cacophonic, atonal –

discordant, insistent, repetitive, clashing, grating, fractured

like shattered glass.

 

The fight for place.

The urge of self.

The will to live.

 

There is a lightness of spirit and tone to the book that keeps one reading as one would a good novel, and a clarity of thought and sensitivity to cadence and tone, without straining for effect, that keeps sending one back to the book. It’s a vade mecum: a go-with-me book, like a smart, kind, slightly rumpled and dependable friend you happen to be able to carry in your pocket.

Like many travelers to India, the poet finds himself both fascinated and appalled by the life there. He can’t resolve it. Maybe no one can. It’s life on earth laid bare – as a beggar and a child.

 

The bus rolls on

into a 5-hour trip.

We pass rolls of shops and stalls

with three, four, six people,

often men, standing around the owners,

gossiping, teashops, or a stree-side chappati vendor

and another knot, standing, talking.

 

Into evening, and later,

the squalor and the waiting lie inside me

unresolved, like oil and water.

 

______

 

Christopher Bernard is a writer, poet, editor and journalist living in San Francisco. His books include the widely acclaimed novel A Spy in the Ruins; a book of stories, In the American Night; and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His work has appeared in many publications, including cultural and arts journalism in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, and poetry and fiction in literary reviews in the U.S. and U.K. He has also written plays and an opera (libretto and score) that have been produced and radio broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry films have been screened in San Francisco and his poetry and fiction have been nominated for Puschcart Prizes. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org) and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.