So I was
trying to find some good writers to read. Reading is an investment of time, presence
and effort; hence you have to choose carefully as if your life depends on it or
else do not read, go for a walk or hang upside down, just don’t degrade
yourself by reading mediocre nonsense that forms much of writing these days. Crass
stampede to get attention, they demean the medium as also devalue humanity. Your
presence is important to life don’t disregard by participating in the orgy of degradation,
the sickness that invades the soul if you are not discerning and vigilant. Your
attention is precious to your being. As I was meticulously flipping through website
to anchor on to the best of writers I was in presence of remarkable human being
and a brilliant writer. I really haven’t heard of Harry Martinson before, and
so here I was trying to find more of his writing. Harry Martinson was a Swedish
writer and poet. He was an orphan who had a tough life, while a teenager he ran
away from foster home and picked up odd menial jobs. He eventually got a job as
a stoker labor, shoveling coal into the boilers firebox to power the engine of
the ship -the same that was used in steam engine of railways that some of us
have seen in old movies. This one of the poems that I happen to read:
Meditative
stillness is unique evolution of human mind and relatively rare communion of
society. It is not chance or providence but unique characteristic that is
patterned in ideas, freedom and expressions that leads to stillness, a deeper
involvement with life. Political and economic stability plays a significant role
but isn’t the defining. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians are examples in its varying
and unique expression of thoughts and aesthetics that survived in unique
strands to emerge as and when society stills and individual meditates. Societies
were not egalitarian but majority enjoyed spaces that had access to meditative
stillness. This stillness is not satisfaction but absence of crave. It is inquisitive
awareness of human condition necessarily hinged on compassion. Primitive
societies survive on fear and crave, they herd to exist. Even with material
comfort and economic security they are trapped in their pathetic life of want
and control. Individual minds remain putrid pits while society becomes sinkhole
that attract the worst. Much of world is trapped in this vicious state, and any
number of opportunities of modern technologies and egalitarian options is
wasted. Their occupations are daily struggles of negation of life and possibilities.
Their crude expressions and stale ideas nurture crass entertainments of want
and inspiration for crave.
Much
of framework for human enterprise and progress stems from meditative stillness
that seeps into all forms of human expressions and thoughts. It needs constant strive
to reach this luxury of stillness. For hundreds and thousands of years nature
provided this stillness for life to thrive. This created brilliant expressions
of biodiversity. With consciousness human mind reach meditative state. Very few
regions of the world have achieved this evolved state that a self-taught man living
in worst of condition could produce such astounding expression of subtlety and
finesse. Such spaces are precious. Ofcourse in the last few years virtual world has created such spaces that is accessible from all across the world.
Harry Martinson also happened to visit Bombay (now Mumbai India) in 1920s while his ship was docked for few days. His observation in those few hours that he spent in Mumbai is a testament to sensibilities that I rarely find in Indian writers who spent lifetime in putrid pit lacking compassion or connection with life except as patronizing or self-justifying redemption of miserable life cloaked in blessing. Martinson writes “Sometimes my whole being shudders at the inconceivability of the throng, at the unimaginability of the multitude of sights”. There is poignant mention of his witnessing ‘dancing girls’ on the streets, compassion as he documents his observations. “Small groups of dancers, the youngest of the dancing girls not more than five years old at the most, wild, tormented, ecstatic, most of the time commanded by an old man, continuously shouting and threatening, ugly and repulsive: a sensational and upsetting contrast to the slender beauty of the whirling little dancers” Martinson writes “Bells are ringing wildly on the ankles of the tiny ballet dancers. He, the ugly one, shouts when the dance shall go over into acrobatics, and the tiny ones go backwards on their hands and feet, their bellies pointing up towards the sky. He shouts, as if he wanted to kill them, and they throw their legs up as they dance on, standing on their hands while he, with a murderous expression, plays on a monotonously humming string instrument; with the form of a fish and the appearance of a museum specimen, prehistorically evil”.... “What if John Bauer had seen you, dear little heart. How happy he would have been. John Bauer was our great fairy tale painter. He drowned in a long, spool-shaped lake called Vättern. He would have painted a dark picture of you, deep as a fairy tale. You would be sitting on an enormous lingonberry tuft within the woods of Holaved, blinking with your eyes, as dark as a wood-mere, so that the mere itself would rumble like thunder down in its mud, rumble out of envy”. Martinson pays money to the man to stop the exploitation, and writes that he wanted to hurt the man but avoided such a confrontation as he was concerned for the girls. “I could never be that cruel, not even if I was so angry with both the entire Brahminism and the vast constipation of the English lord system”. With this prescient line he was able to put his finger on the pulse of this degraded depraved society that generations of mediocre Indian writers nurtured to control narration lacked in moral capacity. And if you glimpse through the literary awards, you will see this urge to control narration as also nepotism of squatter camaraderie breeding the most mediocre but with high sense of self-worth of blessed gift. Like everything else most Indian writers are embarrassment. That they couldn’t sufficiently appreciate writers of caliber, like say, Mohd Basheer speaks of beggar minds haggling for next meal while stampeding for power and connections. Here artists are cheapskates who create slum cakes while marketeers define art. Mediocre nurture crass to justify itself.
