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I came to you

Lord, because of

the fucking reticence

of this world

no, not the world, not reticence, oh

Lord Come

We were sad on the ground

Lord Come

We were sad on the ground.

That’s Jean Valentine for you, in all her pithiness, a sublime accrual of minimalism, the poem amplifying the deafening silence – etymologically derived from the Latin reticentia "silence, a keeping silent"; however, we are not here to establish how a myriad-mouthed curiosity of a seemingly simple word snowballed into a critique of one of the most poignant films I’ve watched lately.

And yet Thomas Stuber’s film ‘In the Aisles’ (In den Gängen), takes a cue from the word ‘reticence’ and subverts it with muted panache. I will not give anything away, as far as the plot goes, the screenplay is adapted by a short story from Clemens Meyer, but one must exalt, applaud Peter Matjasko’s cinematography and Stuber’s vision to paint us a film, rooted in German romanticism and philosophically laced with a quiet stoicism. Stuber choreographs his film mostly away from the ‘repoussoir’ and towards the ‘Rückenfigur’ figure, emblematic of Caspar David Friedrich, giving the viewers a proxy view. Stuber’s cinematic idiom is one of subtlety and restraint, where intimacies are built around blue-collared workers working with forklifts; not with the pace of an anticipated frenetic brushstroke but a languid waltz, a Chopin nocturne at an andante tempo. Matjasko’s camera lingers coquettishly on Hüller and Rogowski; vignettes provisionally captured that brings wider allusions to play; a semi-erotic languorous seduction with a nod to Wang Kar Wai in its affinity for transience and elegant, ruptured passion felt, but not consummated. The diegetic sound of the forklifts frolicking on the shopfloor, to be interrupted by Suite No. 3 in D by Bach is a touch of brilliance.

The reticence, the silence is representative of a larger societal malaise and while each worker’s individual strife is salient, even cruel, the film offers redemption and hope by way of a tender camaraderie, little acts of kindnesses; a collective celebration of the human spirit. Multiple motifs ricochet between scenes to highlight a collegial tenderness, that shimmers, then builds to a crescendo, where the dappled translucence gives way to a solemn covenant between people. One scene, in particular, is poignant, where on Christmas Eve, all the workers are feasting on expired sausages and beer, a surreptitious gift stolen from the dust bins: a secret shared by all the workers as kin, as family united by their hunger, and their gratitude for small mercies. I had tears in my eyes at the profundity of that one scene. *** ‘Everything conspires to make us forget the socially constructed, and hence arbitrary and artificial, character of investment in the economic game and its stakes: the ultimate reasons for commitment to work, a career or the pursuit of profit in fact lie beyond or outside calculation and calculating reason in the obscure depths of a historically constituted habitus, which means that, in normal circumstances, one gets up every day to go to work without deliberating on the issue, as indeed one did yesterday and will do tomorrow.’ – Pierre Bourdieu Another significantly important prism to deconstruct the film, with reasonable temerity would be a brief social commentary invoking Bourdieu’s cultural capital in three forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalised. The anxiety, the permanent stress of insecurity and uncertainty is visible, albeit in a concealed manner, where the precariousness of the worker’s situation reflects in the fastidiousness with which they go about their jobs; the lather-rinse-repeatedness of their 15-minutes break to alleviate the tedium of their mundane jobs. Mastering the forklift becomes both a credible threat, and acquired competence for Rogowski. The entire squad waits with bated breath, as he clears his test and acquires his forklift licence, the crowd bursting into a rapturous applause on successful completion. Immensely moved by the film, I came away thinking of another poem by Komunyakaa:

My father could only sign His name, but he'd look at blueprints & say how many bricks Formed each wall. This man, Who stole roses & hyacinth For his yard, would stand there With eyes closed & fists balled, Labouring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say.

#poetry #cinema #german romanticism

You know that we all, no matter what we do, answer to the time we were born in. We are the time we inhabit. Whether it is Dickinson or Beckett. The artist who documents the situation, whether by paint, film, or writing, is an observer who may feel guilty for this outsider role unless he or she is encouraged. Fanny Howe

In conversation with Jeet Thayil at the Chandigarh Literature Festival, 2015

2015: A retrospective

The (Great) Indian Poetry Prize Announces Three Winners Jeet Thayil selects Rohan Chhetri as winner of Emerging Poets Prize Jennifer Robertson & Vidhu Aggarwal win Editor’s Choice https://greatindianpoetrycollective.wordpress.com/

Three emerging Indian women poets with voices you cannot ignore

Sohini writes about animals with the same “phantasmagoric and anecdotal impulse” of a Russell Edson poem, minus the Ted Hughes bravado and bestiality. Could this be born out of a Jungian impulse : dreams originating in the unconscious moving autonomously into the conscious and external space of a poem? Her ruminations end on a timorous, indecisive note: could we be both dew and gravel? Sohini says the poem was partly inspired by Wisława Szymborska's poem, 'The Joy of Writing'

Mnemonic It started with matchboxes. On my first collectible I Recall a black ship sailing, so on the second, its twin found En route to school. I traded in duplicates. With time, Memorabilia changed to notebooks. I collected in between: Eagle’s feathers, shiny wrapping paper, phone numbers, Magnets, and all those letters addressed to you. Rhyming Billets-doux, confessionals, pieces of my mind and heart Engraved in red: ink feelings spilling over the borders. Read my essay for Scroll here: http://scroll.in/article/743833/three-emerging-indian-women-poets-with-voices-you-cannot-ignore

Is Ranjit Hoskote the most interesting Indian poet writing about women?

While re-reading Ranjit Hoskote’s Vanishing Acts (2006), I realised that Hoskote writes exquisitely well about women. His poems have an acutely keen, lynx-eyed vision, coupled with an attentiveness to the minutiae of their mystical inner lives, often addressing metaphysical questions with an intuitive, precise timbre. I found a substantial miscellany of beautiful women existing in his poems: the scarred child, voyeur, clairvoyante, a grandmother who once was a fever tree. In his poem Portrait of a Lady, he compels us to look at inanimate objects with the artful vigilance of a Zbigniew Herbert poem. Read my essay for Scroll here: http://scroll.in/article/770733/is-ranjit-hoskote-the-most-interesting-indian-poet-writing-about-women

American Book Review

Founded in 1977, the American Book Review is a nonprofit, internationally distributed publication that appears six times a year. ABR specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women's presses. ABR as a literary journal aims to project the sense of engagement that writers themselves feel about what is being published. It is edited and produced by writers for writers and the general public. In Focus: Little India http://americanbookreview.org/ Read my review of Sudeep Sen’s Fractals here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=%2Fjournals%2Famerican_book_review%2Fv036%2F36.6.robertson.html

Saudade isn’t homesickness, lack, or longing [...] The German Sehnsucht and the Icelandic söknudur seem to suck out the meaning of the word; the Polish tesknota sounds bureaucratic; the Czech stesk shrinks, cringes, cowers; and the Estonion igatsus would come closer if spoken backwards. Maybe saudade isn’t saudade. Valeria Luiselli

Eating Out Alone The loneliness inside me is a place, Harvard where no one might always be someone. When we're alone people we run from change to the mysterious and beautiful-- I am eating alone at a small white table, visible, ignored...the moment that tries the soul, an explorer going blind in polar whiteness. Yet everyone who is seated is a lay,, or Paul Claudel, at the next table declaiming: "L'Academie Groton, eh, c'est une ecole des cochons." He soars from murdered English to killing French, no word unheard, no sentence understood-- a vocabulary to mortify Racine... the minotaur steaming in a maze of eloquence” Robert Lowell

#Lowell

Who is man? He is the one who must bear witness to what he is. To bear witness can signify to testify, but it also means to be answerable for what one has testified in one's testimony. Man is he who he is precisely in the attestation of his own existence. This attestation does not mean a sub- sequent and additional expression of mans being; rather, it forms a part of man's existence. But what should man testify to? To his belonging to the earth. This belonging consists in the fact that man is the inheritor, and the learner of all things. But things, of course, stand in opposition. What keeps things apart in opposition and at the same time joins them together, Hölderlin calls "intimacy."

Hölderlin and the essence of poetry

Animalinside, by László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann

I am there inside, you carry me within your own self, it’s of no help at all, not the nice bearing with the head nicely tilted to one side, not the nice clothes, not the nice coat, not the two nice shoes neatly shining, nothing, and now you’re still thinking about nice things, thinking for example well let’s have a look at what’s over there, that looks pretty ghastly let’s admit it, you say good-naturedly and unsuspectingly, you clasp your hands behind your back, you put your two nice clean shoes next to each other, and you lean to the left and you look at me, erroneously, because it’s not me that you’re looking at, even if you think you are, because I, that thing that looks so ghastly, is within you Animalinside: A Collaboration László Krasznahorkai, illustrated by Max Neumann

Polaroid Picture of a Face Before Rigor Mortis Sets in

For my Father

This corpse is sculpted Like Rodin hands – hands with history, bristling, barking fingers of caprice and tenderness. Now, that is something Rilke would write.

I write stuff, mostly abrupt prose in the guise of a poem assemble words like morgue – and metatarsal, hoping for a radical bonhomie of sorts.

I grope the dead, for nocturnal conversations: brazen but intimate, along the lines of arteries and veins, bleeding its bluest blue.

I also write about the synovial joint and patella. These are the words I remember among other words that are faint and feeble, calligraphed on a prescription letter.

(cranium and mandible)

This is how I recognise bones from people, Dads from Doctors – who show their daughters polaroid pictures of faces before rigor mortis sets in. http://www.antiserious.com/2015/06/21/polaroid-picture-of-a-face-before-rigor-mortis-sets-in/

What I Write About When I Write About Bones Coccyx There’s nothing platonic about writing. And there is nothing sexier than a well writ sentence. I love to watch the tension between phrases, an ill-fitted, rank outsider word getting acclimatised: the cutting, the pruning, the economy of slitting a word bare, the descent into pithiness, the elevation into a body of leanness. The sheer vanity of sentence creation is nothing short of spectacular love making. http://www.antiserious.com/2015/05/18/what-i-write-about-when-i-write-about-bones/

X-Ray One doesn’t discover loneliness suddenly like an experiment — Like Roentgen filming Bertha’s hand with a ring on her finger. It’s a disease like the weather. Like Fog. Carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges show up as white. The air in your lungs shows up as black. But the fog goes undetected. https://www.antiserious.com/tag/jennifer-robertson/

Bastienne Schmidt. Salt.

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