In the new Google and Apple world, the individual loses his or her edge exactly as in a mega mall. Or in an airport. You sift through racks. Or clear the ticket counter and the security. There are fixed ways to behave. There are rules. There are queues.
The greatest corruption that a post-informational society assists into birth is a uniform world, where our most personal opinions and the most intimate desires must express themselves as acceptable to groups. So what do we do? We pretend that inside and outside we are the same. The kind of thing a politician—the ultimate salesman—perhaps will do to win your vote.
To the natural outsider (recall Albert Camus’s Meursault in The Outsider), which is what a sensitive poet essentially could be, the most universal form of repression is political correctness, an offshoot really of the global marketplace that the world is. You can agree with someone in Paris on the Gaza issue and feel good. You are a rebel even while sitting on your toilet. You are constantly seeking to be grouped and regrouped. You are never alone with the things that cannot be shared. Never alone with your inadequacies and failings, the source of your poetry.
Is this good for the poet? As Michel Houellebecq, an iconoclast French writer often in the news for the wrong reasons, says in one of his poems, “I will go home with my lungs/ The tiles will be freezing./ As a child I loved sweets/ And now nothing matters.” ‘Now nothing matters’ because even loss has been homogenised and collectivised. Sweets do not feel the same to the now-blubbery tongue.
I have published five volumes of poetry, including a volume of collected and new poems (Available Light). I have no illusion about their permanence. You write a poem, and no matter how good it is, it is water over your head in these times of tsunamis of distraction. But you must still pay a price for your lines.
In India, just now, there is an explosion of poetry, most of it attributable to the readymade town square of social media. The cell phone is your trumpet. Hundreds of new poets throng the counters, murderous self-promotion gleaming in their eyes. Some of them come with awards in their pockets, form a group and honour the others in the group. In a highly literary market like Kerala, for example, the awards go in circles and everyone gets at least one. According to one reliable drawing room estimate, there are over two lakh poets in the state.
Besides mainstream publishing houses, scores of independent presses have come into being all over India. Online publishing is flourishing. Poetry readings are as common as gatherings of crows. And anthologies, unlike in the past, compete to include rather than exclude.
The natural sense of loss, that out-of-place feeling that once perhaps defined a state of being of the compulsively marginal bard, is precisely what his or her updated version must dangle to attract the market. The endless festivals and readings and online meetings are the malls where you hope to buy a little fame in exchange for a lot of words you no longer can truly claim as true. What must jockeying of this type do to one’s integrity? This unwavering and constant urge to sell?
Recent English anthologies edited by poets like Jeet Thayil or Sudeep Sen, or the Yearbook of Indian Poetry (last edition edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal) run into many hundreds of pages. These are monumental efforts. Equally, these are great democratic exercises as well. But in the process, poetry itself might have been dumbed down. I could be wrong. But is a festival talking about this possibility?
Does the proliferation of poets proportionately translate into quality? It is hard to say because there are no longer any clear standards, save the one of the community that one has assiduously worked one’s entry into. It might be too much to say that we are sitting on a heap of collapsed aesthetic values. But the idea persists.
“Go right to the bottom of the absence of love,” says Houellebecq, “Cultivate self-hatred. Hatred of oneself, contempt for others. Hatred of others, contempt for oneself… In the tumult of life, always be the loser…To learn to become a poet is to unlearn how to live.”
What the new poet is looking for is a stage, a studio, a mic, but not experience, that basic unit of art. We end up censoring even our thoughts to facilitate access to these dead objects. Our so-called literary endeavours must therefore embody more falsity than truth. And the logical culmination of the lack of individuation is the AI poet. The automaton poet, smoothed off all his edges, still making noises. The end of the extreme correct society is a robot. It cannot fail or fall. And it has no gender. It is correct because it has no conflict.
But without Man falling, there is neither the Bible, which to me is a handbook to the art of fall, nor Art. James Joyce’s great words ring hollow: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him… the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”
You believe those words, you will believe anything.
C P Surendran | Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)