The Bibliophile by Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, 1862
Foreword
Ashoak Upadhyay
In an age when literary prizes are garnered by fiction, be it in the form of the short story or novel and poetry, what identity can the essay have other than a string of rules-based words one reads on the editorial pages of newspapers or as political tracts or guides to wellness? The essay has been clothed with the garb of an instrumentality that hides its rich antecedents in literary modes of expression as diverse as the “essays” of Montaigne, the non-fictions of Jorge-Luis Borges and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, where he converts the the essay into a novel, transforming both modes by existentializing the former and rendering plot-less the latter, both united by an underlying concern for ethical action. In Borges, the essay frequently crosses the borders between fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and reality, the trivia and the profound to paint word-minatures. Thus in Evarristo Carriego, his “biography” of the Argentinian poet of the run-down parts of Buenos Aires, Borges writes: “I believe that a chronological account is inappropriate to Carriego, a man whose life was made up of walks and conversations. To reduce him to a list, to trace the order of his days, seems to me impossible; far better seek jhis eternity, his patterns. Only a timeless description, lingering with love, can bring him back.” (p 55) Or, again, “Life, desperate life, was in his eyes..” (p 53)
At another remove is Peter Altenberg, writer and flaneur of the end of nineteenth century Vienna, Austria, whose innovative e essays he termed “Telegram Style” of writing straddled the line between prose and poetry, fiction and observation. Here’s a vignette: “There are geniuses among the tulips, too, just as there are in every manifestation of the organic!…I once had a white tulip that stayed shut tight, immaculate and virginal, for a full fourteen days, despite the warmth of my room and water.” (p16) Franz Kafka called him a “singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses.”
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Riyaz Latif, bilingual poet and translator, art and architectural historian, brings to bear on his prose a poetic vision that finds expression in the fluency of his language that, in turn is fuelled by a keen observation of the quotidian and a sensibility that can inspre border-crossings between an image and his sense of its place in the observed and imagined world. His essays shown below that have appeared variously in The Beacon are not ratiocinative but figurative, imagistic. They do not conform to a logical/analytical exposition of an observed facet of reality or fragments of a conversation or explain, vaingloriously perhaps, that facet or aspect as the “human condition.” Latif’s essays explore fragments as pictures or images that emerge through the author’s introspective gaze and, his empathy for the imagined without encompassing it as a whole. In the event, the subject at hand does not distil into a concept, an abstraction but remains alive precisely because it is partial, an experiment in truth viewed askew, sensory representations.
To name a few. In his meditation on Ruins…” for example, Latif composes an elegy for the broken arch, stones scattered about that “released from their regimental composition” display a decline into seeming disorder but embraced by the earth, nourished by their own “unraveling.” The inanimate comes alive as an organism in decay and yet…
At another remove, his study of Degas’ painting, ‘Three Nuns’ titled “Numinous Whirls…” written as pithy essays long before the pandemic, comes to mind precisely at the height of the pandemic when personal loss strikes, when Latif has “to come to terms with the contaminated winds of our rapidly capsizing, disorienting world…” Seeking refuge in a different “valence and meaning” that forgotten essay is “excavated.” For Latif, “Degas’ soft swirling lines” appear as “emblems of hope, emblems of life.” It is the author’s experiments with truth, a slanted truth, as he copes with grief not just through the usual realities of coping but through the agency of art as representation of the possibility of recovery and recuperation.
Happenstance and observation inspire ruminations on a flight of starlings seen through a window of an office in Ahmedabad city, “At A Window…” is a rumination that the author rather too modestly terms purposeless; but that could be said of most essays that do not conform to those rules that one was forced to learn at school about writing or compositions of political treatises as exercises in the obvious, accomplished fact. Latif’s observations adhere to the unspoken search for the tilted truth, an elliptical vision that attempts through its fragmentary gaze to existentialise the banality and cruelty of manufactured reality by writing of a time “when the river Sabarmati still very organically bared its cracked, parched soul to the city, before it was turned into a manicured stream bound by stern concrete promenades under the Albert Speer-like despotic vision of the powers that be,” The starlings arrive and the author’s vision enframed by the window is yet unbounded as it follows the rapturous ecstasy of their joyous flight: the earth below with its manufactured dissonance and the sky above with its unfettered beauty and grace; bondage aand freedom bookend life itself. The author’s empathic gaze offers up that metaphysical truth, embedded in the fluttering wings, the symphony of flight, the cadence of harmonized throbbing life, a vista of possibilities waiting to be explored here on earth, the arena of bondage perhaps.
The essay inspired yet another poet, Asif Raza, also a frequent contributor to this journal. to pen a response, “Reading ‘At A Window’…” offers up an interpretation, a reading that forms an essay in its own right, an interpretation of an interpretation. Raza states “Latif’s rueful escape from the disordered and distorted world he inhabits, and his refuge in his “seething silence,” in other words, his retributory rejection of it, and his turning inwards, attests to the fact that an individual’s alienation, isolated consciousness, fragmentation of self, are tropes that have never ceased to represent the angst of self-aware individuals in the technologically advanced postmodern age”
Ghosts of Malkauns was inspired by a conversation with late M.A. Dhaky, art and architectural historian and polymath who expressed this idea in the paranormal effects of the Raga Malkauns, that could, if sung at night conjure up spirits and astral bodies. Latif does not expend energy in rubbishing the fanciful notion; instead he ‘hears’ their “lyricism” and is inspired enough to weave a magical tour of the raga’s effects on the listener seated on the banks of the Ganga at night.
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The Beacon’s belief in the poetic visions embodied in the essay form flows from a conviction that creative writing knows no boundaries; writing is an experiment. Montaigne, the father as it were of the form, used the term ‘assai’ meaning to attempt, to put one’s thoughts in writing. To understand the complex world, not by abstract concepts but through lived experience, observation of fragments, of life in its glory and ruins. More than any other creative form and certainly more than the novel, where Flaubert’s advice that the author must be like God, invisible but present everywhere has merit, in the essay genre, the author is at the center of the enterprise. That is what makes the essay parchments of an author’s inner life: epistles of the soul. Unfinished portraits in prose.
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Notes. --The Borges quotes are from: Evarristo Carriego. Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Norman Di Giovanni. E.P. Dutton. New York. 1984. --Peter Alternberg quote is from: Telegrams of the Soul. Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg. Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman Archipelego Books. 2005
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Ruins: A Requiem for the Fragment Numinous Whirls in Degas’ Study of Nuns At a Window, Waiting for the Starlings Reading “At a Window, Waiting for the Starlings” GHOSTS of MALKAUNS
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