Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Meditation kills ergo Dance

Like pollen grains on water
Like a sunbeam crossing
Little wholes in the thatch roof,
Or the greedy anxious believer
Of chance over money
Stumbling, stuck, kicked
Exponential these moves uncanny

Classes, teaching metaphysics
Or those with the bent for analysis situs
Or when we run, run, run and run
When we play, when we laugh
And we go hip or dance
While we win when we toss
And we move on the train while this friend, just stand

In those heathen times
While we made love to our moms
Those uncouth bums only danced
To the tunes of their muse
And then night, in the dark
With those spears in their hands
That blood bath off the shore
While prevails all over this silence of the strand

But then the time passes as the truth
Not the water in a river
Come meta-humans of those books
And those kings and the queens
While the well-fed thinker thinks
It’s not done, why a father of the father?
When even we don’t need a father
He proposes only beauty
And forgets the substance

Beauty kills, creates the hunger
So you heathen! You think,
You might go any longer
But you are myopic, you so called seer
Cause you are not informed
That Euclid is dead, huh!
You still live in that world-former
But any way so was Marx
Alas! Oh! Bakunin
You were not much of a talker

Thursday, July 12, 2007

गजानन माधव मुक्तिबोध : चांद का मुँह टेढा है ???


बहुत ही दुःख होता है अब मुक्तिबोध को पढ़ कर जब कि हम मिल्तों (Milton) कि कवितायेँ पढ़ कर बडे हुए । दुःख होता है कि किसी ने पहले क्यों नही बताया कि हिंदी साहित्य मे खालिस aesthetics पर ही नही विचारा गया है और किरातार्जुनियम और कुमारसंभव (जो कि स्पष्ट रुप से संस्कृत साहित्य है ,लेकिन हम प्रारम्भ वहीँ से करते हैं ;अतः मैं हिंदी साहित्य को एक तरह से भारतीय साहित्य यहाँ कहना चाहूँगा) से लेकर बाद तक के काव्य मे केवल एक vague भावना के ,जिसका कोई सीधा समाज से लेना देना नही है के आस पास ही नही घूमा गया है । और दूसरी तरफ जैसा कि जनवादी कविताओं मे पाया जता है , ऐसा भी नही है कि कवितायेँ केवल सामाजिक समस्याओं की एक प्रतीकात्मक सूची बन कर रह गईँ हैं । लेकिन यह दृष्टि कोंड केवल मुक्तिबोध को पढने के बाद ही आसानी से बन पा ता है ।

मुक्तिबोध मे मिल्तों की कविताओं जैसा घनत्व है , पौंड और एल्लिओत जैसी प्रथम दृष्टया जटिलता है और बहुत ही अनूठे ढंग से, हालांकि कि हिंदी साहित्य के विद्वान् संभवतः अनुमोदन ना करें , संफ्रंसिस्को पुनर्जागरण अथवा Beat Movement के कवियों (Allen Ginsberg ,Kenneth Rexroth , Gary Snyder इत्यादि ) जैसी अभिव्यक्तात्मक स्वतंत्रता है । कहीँ कहीँ हम उनकी कविताओं मे फ्रेंच कवियों जैसे कि Arthur Rimbaud और Paul Verlaine जैसी प्रतीकात्मकता कि भी झलक पाते हैं । हालांकि इस तरह से उनका मुल्यांकन करना एकदम उचित नही है , किन्तु जैसा कि स्पष्ट है कि यह लेख मुख्यतः उनके लिए है जो मुक्तिबोध से परिचित नही हैं और जो यूरोपियन तथा अमेरिकन साहित्य के ज्यादा नजदीक रहे हैं , यह एक सहज रास्ता दीख पड़ता है उन्हें मुक्तिबोध कि कविताओं से परिचित कराने मे ।
मेरी अपनी समझ मे उनकी प्रतिनिधि कविताओं का संकलन पर्याप्त है उनमे रूचि पैदा करने मे । पहली कविता ही
झंक्झोर देने वाली है ' पूंजीवादी समाज के प्रति '। और अन्तिम कविता उनकी मानसिक स्थिति को निस्कर्षित करती है ....
"बेचैन चील उस जैसा मैं पर्यटन शील ........"। सही ही कहा है अशोक वाजपेयी जीं ने मुक्तिबोध के बारे मे कि वो एक कठिन समय के कठिन कवि हैं । लगभग सभी कवितायेँ मरणोपरांत प्रकाशित हुईं । कठिन आर्थिक पारिवारिक जीवन से जूझते रहने के बावजूद साहित्य से जुडे रहना , वह भी पचास के दशक मे , कविता मे प्रयोग करना यह सब उनके मौलिक वादी होने के साथ साथ साहित्य से उनकी प्रतिबद्धता का सूचक है । लंबी कविता का चलन चला कर वो avant-garde कविओं मे स्थान रखते हैं । मुख्यतः एक कवि होने के बावजूद गद्य साहित्य मे प्रयोग किये ....ब्रह्म राक्षस का शिष्य ......एक ऐसी कहानी है जो हिंदी मे फंतासी और अति यथार्थ वादी (fantasy और surrealism ) भावनाओं का अनूठा संगम मालूम पड़ती है ।
और भी बहुत कुछ है कहने को पर स्थान और शब्द पर्याप्त नही हैं ।


Wednesday, May 9, 2007

"Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen" versus "ignoramus et ignorabimus"


Whatever i am about to write was known to Zeno of Elea,and therefore to everyone. First thing i came to know,which is culture inculcated, that believing that earth is flat is wrong and that earth is spherical or elliptic is right.Zeno also knew that ,but since he and everyone thought in terms of Euclid (and even today we somehow think a la Euclid),a paradox was celebrated .Paradoxes are simply manifestations of extremes out of continuum of a causal chain.So the problem emanates from the conceptions of extremes and continuum itself.The conception of continuum seems, prima facie, intuitively clear to human brain and ergo the secret of the ambiguity appears to lie somewhere in the perception of extremes or the infinity.Though deeper inspection reveals that the conception of continuum is nothing else but a meta-construct on the conception of infinity.
Digression: When we were young ,we never passed things in silence and were not aware of anagrams which were not a priori anagrams.Self-reference is the truth was known to the Charvaka,others couldn't understand it because it was so simple, so mundane, pertaining to the quotidian(what we don't understand is the simple and complex is what we understand,should I support it with academic reference of Murray Gell Mann ?) .Put it otherwise, the Charvaka proposed that epistemology is in vein and that's why one should just live and do whatsoever to sustain livelihood.For obvious reasons they were supposed to be a group of bums and social parasites. Human brain is regimented in a way that we mostly understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new........ will-o'-the-wisp.These became slowly 'things of the past'.Something happened of significance in the western hemisphere in the early 20th century(What follows is serious name-dropping and my apologies for that.).Mostly it has to do with the Hilbert's programme,not negating the influence of Frege,Whitehead,Russell(Principia..) and Peano on its development.They firmly believed that regimentation of language is solution to 'the problem'.Things started well and Principia was the symbol .But a permanent halt came when this not so regular member of 'der Wiener Kreis' called Kurt Godel suggested starkly clear through his two 'Incompleteness Theorems' that the Hilbert's programme cannot be carried out .And viola! what a similarity between Godel's and Charvaka's propositions.This historical and hence cyclical movement itself records ,though vaguely,the idea of the incompleteness theorems,that "we understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new......will-o'-the-wisp"(contd.)