I had not been sure that I would get a poem on Vrindaban written by a poet who would be not from India, but from some far off land, never visited, never dreamt of, but I got it after perusing and pursuing Neruda for in vain and some others, trying to move along the corridor of memory and reflection, finding it on the terrace of thought and idea decorating my digital bookshelf and the book made available through library archives. Though the Krishnite bhaktas felt it down the ages world over, trying to shrug off publicity, which but we could not feel it, the crux of the matter, but apart from, the one which it has come from the pen of the Mexican writer is our matter of pride as for what a foreigner like him feels it about and that too how can he be a foreigner if one is a Krishnabhakta lost in Krishnaprem? Let us see  how his feelings and emotions are, what does he feel about visiting the precincts? Had the magazines not published about, had the translators not translated, we would not have such a great poem. Translators too show the way which but know we not, how the interpreters have helped us in understanding, taking communication far.

Eliot Weinberger the editor of the volume in his preface talks about Octavio Paz being appointed as the Mexican ambassador to India, his marriage with the French wife, his growing of interest in Indian art and philosophy and the exhibition of the Tantric art in the West.

The poem runs through zigzag lines, following a rhythmic pattern of own, lines cut short, downed and joined and re-joined to make a meaning and sense. Half-said words carry on the meaning. Half-said sentences and statements take to a different plane of thinking. So personally written, privately felt, it is a poem of self-introspection; a poem of visit and feeling within, what is lies across, what is beyond the boundaries of self, what it to sustain us!

Let us see how he starts his Spanish poem, how has the translator translated it:

Surrounded by night
immense forest of breathing
vast impalpable curtains
murmurs
I write
    I stop
I write

(All is and is not
and it all falls apart on the page
in silence)

(Octavio Paz; Eliot Weinberger,
The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz,1957-1987,
New Directions: New York, 1991, p.211-13)

Vrindavan, how to take to, Vrindavan, Krishna’s Vrindavan? People visit Vrindavan, tourists, travelers, devotees, worshippers and lovers and so did he, Octavio Paz, the Mexican ambassador and poetry, the lines of its came floating and flowing to with a skeptic stand but drawn to so closer, arising in askance and realization both, as the foreigners often get confronted with for having a tryst with phantasy and reality in viewing India so rich, varied and diverse, contradictory and conflicting. While visiting Vrindavan, on having a tryst with reality and dream, classic scenery and beggars sitting by the sides or the steps leading to the temple way, he feels twitched with as well as gives vent to the things lying unexpressed, poetry coming to as verse-lines of cultural exchange, mesmerizing his conscious domains.

A car races down the street, crossing the extinguished houses and he too races, takes to the path winding, unwinding, folding, unfolding thereon, ruminating in his own. He races among his lighted thoughts and up above lie in the stars.

Who is what bhakta, who is in what search of, how to say it? He is visiting, trying to see from a far-off and the sadhus too, half-naked or altogether different too keep viewing him. What it the dialogue, how the dialogues of the soul? Sculptures, murals, paintings in miniature, terracotta artifacts, classical and romantic seem to be placing on a pedestal.

We live in a world of bare realities, hunger, heat and dust; poverty, scarcity of resources and an uncertain future where the thoughts of a shaky presence seem to be clawing us. But how are those who still keep faith alive beating hunger, seasoning the body? How the chasm of illusion, hallucination? What to say about a manna lost in divine glimpses? Prem, Divya Prem, Love, Divine Love, a chaste one but can only feel it. But we doubt, can love be chaste?

Come gone
Saint scoundrel saint
in beatitudes of hunger or drugs
Perhaps he saw Krishna
sparkling blue tree
dark fountain splashing amid the drought
Perhaps in a cleft stone
he grasped the form of woman
its rent
the formless dizziness
For this or that
he lives on the ghat where they burn the dead

(Ibid, p.217-19)

Without viewing or seeing Vrindaban, how to talk about the place? Where the place, did Krishna spend his childhood playing and fluting? Where the classical scenes, pastoral images? Where the forests deep dark and blue? How the hills lurking blue? And where are the divine notes coming from?

Paz is trying to locate Vrindavan. How the place? How the images of it? How the dreams connected? How the anthropology and sociology of it?

How to see Krishna? Where to see Krishna? How the mystery around the myth? How the classical love-lore? How the history of history, the history of myth, the myth of myth?

He does not know what he is writing; he is writing what he is in the know of. Here things get sculptured, mythicized; here things get destroyed. I am history; I am myth. I am memory; I am reflection. Now say you, what is in whose reflection, how the Reflection of the Divine, the Spark of Divinity? How the brush painting the Divine, the Blue Boy; how the Divine Flute breaking melodies? The image of Krishna, how to see it, where to see it? Where is Krishna?

The ending of the poem will explain how the conclusion reached at the end of the poem:

I know what I know and I write it
The embodiment of time
the act
the movement in which the whole being
is sculptured and destroyed
Consciousness and hands to grasp the hour
I am a history
a memory inventing itself
I am never alone
I speak with you always
you speak with me always
I move in the dark
I plant images

(Ibid, p.221)

Vrindaban is such a poem where the poet searches himself; searches history, culture, tradition, myth and mysticism; reality, justification, logic behind and faith with doubt asserting and re-asserting in belief so elusive. Here he is a traveler, just a time-traveler; a phantom-listener listening to the sadhus seeing and he trying to converse not, but to see the land. He wants to talk, but they hint through. Silence, a world of silence composes them. Just through hint and suggestion, speaking a little, the thing continues it on. What it is in Vrindaban which has brought him to, what it is that has appealed and repelled him.

Some lines written and some lines in the bracket add a new dimension to the poem. The history of thought and tradition, how to tell it? What is it in the self how to say it? How the Image of the Divine? It is the spirit of man which acts like the night-traveler, the phantom-listener, the time-traveler, the fatigued persona, the ascetic, the lover, the artist and the realist from time to time as per his donning of the role.

In a poem like this we can find many a thing similarly expressed adding to our properties, as for example, a bit of H.G. Wells’ time machine and Walter de la Mare’s phantom listeners, the strange horseman and the haunted house may add to our wealth of study otherwise. It is but merely an incidence that Paz is at Vrindaban trying to have a tryst with, cutting the cultural ice. What it is dark should not be explained, let the dark be dark, as said Nissim Ezekiel in Philosophy poem and Jayanta Mahapatra’s Myth and The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore may add to. As the columns of bricks and decaying buildings start the story of the British cemetery at Balasaore so is the case with the mythical bricks of Vrindaban. The Saddhu of Couva by Derek Walcott too may opine it differently if we take to the ingredients altogether to analyze it when he discusses the Ramlila and the daispora. In Myth poem too, the sadhu seems to be looking Mahapatra in askance as he is trying to unfold the reels of myth. A.E. Russell’s Krishna may also be studied, but here in this poem the poet is inquisitive as he tries to know. Yeats’ Meru is also one such poem in this line of reckoning.