Invitation to Poetry: Majrooh Rashid’s Snow Flames

There are few feasts more important and reinvigorating than the feast of poetry. We can’t resist relishing it. However, this wazwan of the Spirit prepared in Kashmir is only sparingly available in English dress. It is tempting to taste it whenever an invitation comes and after tasting it one can well comment on the quality. One such invitation I recently received is in the form of Snow Flames by Majrooh Rashid. You can judge by yourself and mayn’t feel excited about many routine items though it appears that a few dishes – poems – are indeed irresistible. Reading good poetry one  understands how poetry is a feast. First a few points about what is poetry.

When we note, with Baudelaire, that “Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry” and recall the advice of Muriel Rukeyser “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry,” one sees how poetry is a tribute to life and its higher calling and this is of central importance for life and its redemption. It has been well observed that life blooms by virtue of appreciation or celebration and no wonder God and we need to bless (send durood to) life. One may recall Wallace Stevens’ remark “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman,” and Holderlin’s point that the duty of the poet is “to stand/Bare-headed under the storms of God,/Grasping with our own hand/The Father's beam itself, And to offer the gift of heaven, /Wrapped in song, to the people.”  The revelatory nature of poetry has been emphasized from Plato to Coleridge and down to Heidegger. This point is aptly phrased by Jean Cocteau by stating that the poet doesn’t invent but listens. “We never come to thoughts. They come to us” as Heidegger pointed out. The poet’s job is to seek to just be and this attunes one to higher cosmic rhythms. Recall key statements of great poets in different traditions on their divine calling one can’t fail to note how poetry is affirmation of life suffused by love and vivified by the sacred, witness of truth, attention to beauty and a means for salvation – in short a realization of liberating graces of the world of manifestation

Majrooh Rashid is amongst the very few Kashmiri poets who chose to write in multiple languages including  Urdu and English with remarkable   flare and succeeded in attracting  a small but significant chunk of readership. All good poets deserve to be heard.  Here is Majrooh’s case presented in his poem “Mothers Sermon”:

I shouldn’t deprive you from the things

That cling to you

Shaping your round character

Nor should I judge you

Because judging you is a relative act

I too deserve a hearing

Majrooh Rashid’s Snow Flames has some remarkable poetry that dexterously weaves paradoxes of experience as its title indicates. In fact poetry is what illuminates and brings together divergent experiences. Poetry brings us face to face with our own depths, light and darkness, self and void. It doesn’t preach but exposes. We need poetry because we need redemption from fragmentation  and becoming whole, holy. It is love that does the magic of transformation. Majrooh Rashid is a wounded man in search of redemption by guidance from the beloved.

Majrooh is capable of inventing  and weaving a net of images that are going to stay with the reader. Such poems as “A Silken Feeling” have his unique signature.

The scorching sun

Took a shower

Under the cascade of its rays,

The dim lights

Of the milky way

Blushed at mid noon,

The star

Felt soaking in the fathoms

Of eternal feeling,

When a silvery cloud came trailing

From the Himalyan heights,

Wrapping it in its soothing silken arms.

The fusion of the mystical and the romantic and elaborating what may be called Spirit centric view of life is Majrooh’s. Just consider these two poems that speak of love so-called majazi love – but celebrate its depths to suggest haqqeqi love.

Solitary Lamp

Passing through

The narrow lane

Of the long street

Of my memory...

I am once again here,

Standing beside the electric pole

With the solitary flickering lamp,

Looking up to the window

Which would glisten

With the waters of your eyes

And the highway leading

To the Vale of spirit

Would blossom with my tears...

Though it ends on a tragic note:

The window has been shut

And the solitary lamp of the electric pole

Too has stopped flickering

“The Ladder of Mystery”

The spiral ladder of Black curls looks like a meditate....

The steps are numerous,

You can’ climb them all

In this birth

Like the numberless pages of a voluminous tome

And for their  reading and comprehension

A pleasant long life willn’t suffice Khizar

Majrooh impresses us by choice of imagery. One has hardly heard of themes and images he has invented.

Snow flakes as words

These whirling flakes

Gather layer by layer in the yard

And broaden its expanse.

They resemble the pure words

That you would utter in ecstasy.

I would collect them one by one

In the late hours of night

In the moonshine

And put them in the heart’s niche

However, here the comparison ends and the poet is compelled to assert that unlike the snow melting when the sun shines,

your words stay well secured in the nook

And they shimmer when it is dark

Within and without

The poet has little appreciation for winter. But in this he follows such greats as Ghani who gave us such a chilling account of winter. We may recall Camus in praise of autumn as "a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” And about snow one may note that there is no better symbol of purity and serenity than snow.

The poet is one who can’t help himself and turning imagination into a gypsy girl. Treasuring the advice of the mother to exercise  “extreme caution /of dreaming things” in a “world of reality”

Majrooh talks about a treasured theme – visiting mother’s grave – that has been largely forgotten. Very few amongst us find lost key to the Spirit by visiting mother’s grave.

The poet has composed some poems on the art of poetry itself. He brings to life  some remarkable images and connections. One such is Sanjeevani Bloom

None can make it to those peaks

Save the imagination of a poet

“My Memory of You,” and many other poems self reflexively describe creative act or poetry. In fact poetry may well be described as an art of dancing with the words. Muse descends and the poet gets into another world, lost in the world of words and images, and brings us a tree. The theme of creative art is expressed beautifully in “ Attachment”

Instantly you replied,

“attachments lead to pain”

The golden oriole

Of my glance

Became entangled

In a bush

Of prickly words,

Gushing himself,

His unsung crimson song

Trickled down his red eyes

Drop by drop

And his pale yellow face

Blossomed with roses.

This poem, along with “Grip” can be anthologized in any good anthology of poems from Kashmir. Let us read “Grip”

You said

“let go”

He interpreted

“come closer”

Holding your soft hand

Firmly

In his rough hands

He mistook you

For having fallen

For his rustic charm

And rugged looks

Looking into your eyes

His grip on your hand

Loosened

Instantly

as wisdom had dawned on him

by nightfall.

“From the First” see concluding lines:

I will drink the pain that you gave me

In my passion’s reciprocation,

My throat will become blue

Like that of Neelkanth

symbolizing poetry

May be the last line could have been skipped.

Many poems are suffused with mysticism – it appears that  no Kashmiri poet with a name can afford to ignore or reject this mysticism that forms the wellspring of Kashmiri consciousness. Mysticism pure and simple is evident in “Road to Light.”

The flame is the route that springs from the fire

Burning in the fertile soil of dark

And leads to the brilliant sunny countryside

Situated on the banks of eternal river

Where people come out of themselves

And cherish living lives of others

Where thinking of self is worse than

Darkness, and the other is a mirror

In which you see yourself clearly

Last four lines of this poem remind us of a theme in Arnold’s “Dover Beach”

Come let us go onto this floating flame

And make it to the locality

Of compassion and care,

Far from this darkling ambience.

We find some stunningly original points being made here and there such as in “Forbidden Fruit”

Life is neither the Garden of Eden

Nor the tree of cognition

That denied to grow

In its tempting soil

And distinguishing

Good from evil.

It does flow with time,

Has not followed any commandment

In letter and spirit to date.

It hardly faces any threat of exile

Never loses the paradise

That it builds on its own

I would only like to qualify the concluding line and say that it is only a poet who builds for a moment a mansion in paradise and doesn’t lose it as long as he or she can contemplate it. Otherwise we are daily thrown out of this Garden and here we find all of us complaining of some kind of exile, Marjroh Rasheed not excluded.

Although Majrooh is conscious about his roots, he takes modernity’s march as given and traditional symbolism is gone. Such expressions as savage sun, cunning sunshine show traditional symbolism is abandoned . However, spiritual moorings of the work assert unmistakably. Neerja Matto points out what is distinctive about Majrooj’s poetry:

It requires sensitivity, compassion, thoughtfulness and skill to (even in these times) creatively imagine a world full of possibilities: to see the light within the darkness, to recognize the moments of epiphany and to view life itself as almost a spiritual journey. It is this that makes Majrooh Rashid so different and often stunningly original.

Let us read Majrooh and get wounded by his poetry so that we may be helped to subsist in higher spiritual life – we have here a book that is going to stay. Majrooh appears to be every inch a poet breathing in experience and breathing out poetry.  His work creatively appropriates, invokes and builds on the best of Gami and Rusul Mir and here and there one finds Kashmiri Sufi poets getting resurrected in a new idiom that speaks to us the children of secular age.