The opulence of existence

Some journeys doggedly shun the romantic overestimate of human virtue and moral capacity, current in our maudlin and dolorous culture. The appraisal of social facts happens through other, discrete routes. These routes keep out of ideational essences. The essays try to record a series of hard, heightened moments, each hoping to grapple with the forces of endurance along with an awed absorption of flux. Only when we are able to put ourselves in the mannerist gyre of such bewitchment can we revel and tremble before the opulence of existence. We are then able to stand aside. And controvert, when the time arrives.

Only that much is worth recording.

Shubha, one of the finest of our contemporary poets, captures this spare, stubborn drive rather accurately —

• One man himself opts out of competition
• Like a scene in a film he observes the finishing line
• As if there is something beyond it, seeing which
• He does not feel alone
• Wordlessly bears sorrow and grief
• Does not bring desires to his lips
• Sometimes he seems like a mystery
• He does smile and eats food too.

But to assiduously, doggedly embark on life’s travails is not to practice and perpetrate the mystical. Quite the contrary. We do not just tremble like a guilty thing surprised in front of the mountain or the sceptre. There is no complacence of any massive calm. In a rapidly antagonistic and fractious world it is impossible to remain captivated by Blanqui’s eternal melancholic stars where we, guests on our planet, are just prisoners of the moment, “sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space.” That kind of tragic-romantic view shall lead us to accept a repetitive fixity in the universe: the ricorsi. Eventually, that will make us all vassals to power — natural or artificial.

But opulence is about acknowledging and engaging with the differences and the wonderment that lie all around us. Without rhetoric or palliation. Purer forms of romanticism eventually would lead to negative forms of mood and imagination to the point of alienation from body and habitat. Susan Stewart in her nuanced, piercing work The Poet’s Freedom points out the contrast between Coleridge, whose fear of nothingness was expressed in his opium habit and rejection of fancy and Shelley, who mastered to “fear himself and love others.” It is Shelley who realises that we are “thrown back on the task of forming our freedom,” and Coleridge who stands as a warning that “liberated from time and space, the imagination is nowhere.”

Poetry and politics come together at these synapses — where imagination’s flight is thrown back on our travails and labour, until we soar once again. One may tentatively call such a calumnious absorption with things that pass by us: the counter-romantic, one that ferociously takes stock of transitions and recastings — that are born and bred within structures of power and conflict, sometimes measured and played out in the creation, reception and circulation of things that we call art.  Only a counter-romantic spirit can save us from egotist, sentimental and anti-historicist forms of romanticism and at the same time keep on reminding us that life is much richer than what the dehumanising forms of pragmatic, correct or realist undertakings will allow us to believe.

This counter-romantic practice spreads in the very sensuousness and struggles of our daily partaking. It is not an isolated way of living — for as Shubha has marked above: the man smiles and eats too — that is to say, he is active and completes his earthly chores as he must, although he seems to be dormant and lethargic. He has but taken only one decision: to walk outside of the track that promotes egotistical competition, smallness and radical inequality among fellow creatures. The man joins forces with the rest of the human race in the last line.

There is a dignified ascent, for the very mundaneness and monotony of eating and smiling are at once a chore and a possibility. He has not tuned in and opted for higher frequencies. His is not a reaction. He does not entertain a fantasy of reversing proceedings. He is simply refusing a certain idea of time: one that is made available to us easily. He may stand up to power, for his very detachment sends an ominous message of non-negotiation. He is fully immersed in life and in interactions with other creatures, including other human beings.

What is at stake here?  In the very first few passages of his Phenomenology of Mind, GW F Hegel reflects over the relationship of our self-certainty to Night. In the process, he formulates a relationship between our contingent particularities and the claims of the universal in its full historicity:

“If we take it [self-certainty] in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, what is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time….The Now that is night is kept fixed, i.e. it is treated as what it is given out to be, as something which is; but it proves to be rather a something which is not. The Now itself no doubt maintains itself, but as what is not night…The self-maintaining Now is therefore not something immediate but something mediated…A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is not-this, and with equal indifference, this as well as that—a thing of this kind we call Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.”

Here is how an ontology of a lyrical self-consciousness is historicised. There is no self-creation of interiority. It is mediated in and through space and time, through charged interactions. There is a flux deep within the structures of self-creation. Our deepest and the distilled form of articulation: poesis, is both inbound and transitive. Our very intimate sensual and intuitive perceptions, if they have to make sense to another fellow being, and thus turn inter-subjective, must create a distancing from the immediacy of nowness. All our volitional promptings are but extensions that strive to relate to a universal sense of suffering and othering.

Such universality can only happen by means of constantly trying to free ourselves from our primordial, lyrical attachment to any strict phenomenological immersion — in love, faith or beauty. Poesis is such a figuration, a certain toil that the man in Shubha’s poem is undertaking. Therefore, he has opted out of competition — which is another name for the availability that is nowness. He is trying to set himself free to history by deciding to distance himself from the immediacy of his condition, especially since he is intricately rooted and attached to his time and space. That is also the reason why he does not feel alone. Alienation bypasses him.

This is how, by exaggerating the transformative potential of the self, by reconnecting the fragmented lyrical "I" to the flux of our material transactions, that poesis seizes form from our living and from nature too. To arrive at this condition is a difficult material struggle. There is no prior knowledge for poesis to draw from and happen. One takes a leap. An emergence may or may not take place.

The heroic nature of such an act of self-creation only can only lie in his stoic steeliness in the face of the drama of existence. After all wastage, there is steel. And with and after steel: joy. The joy of being able to live and dream freely and equitably with other unfortunate, bereft, forgotten beings is what drives the counter-romantic. For the artistic and the political can only be marked in and through our collective, historical engagements, which are also changing colour, morphing and meandering every waking hour.

So, the writerly sharing of the surplus of joy is also a historical, collective journey. The opulence that this process of steeling simultaneously must lead to is a generative void and an architecture of liberty. Such a liberative sense of an economy of joy (always dialectically intertwined with the paroxysm of agony) stands sentinel against all ideas of private cheerfulness and domesticated, popular happiness — the relentless dead pleasures of commodified hell. One coordinate of the counter-romantic therefore hover close to what Henri Lefebvre has called the architecture of enjoyment.

Opulence is full and complete entanglement with life. And yet one must keep on marking and measuring the unfairness, often man-made, within the differences, that keep on battering us. Relentlessly and unfailingly. There is no other way but to keep on gauging the intersections of all humiliations and discrepancies in an essentially disharmonious world. Marking opulence means a commitment to intervene wherever such discrepancies arise; it means hope without optimism, in the words of Terry Eagleton. One cannot congenitally be disposed to believe, like the optimist, that things will get better. There is nothing called spiritual betrayal of the equity of living. Just as there is no scope for any half-hearted, brothy left-liberal idea of justice as an antidote to the forms of betrayal. It is this regimen of half-heartedness, this punfunctory, spiritless apathy with life that these essays take on.

Most of all, one always meets enthralling vices all the way down — right at the very core of our most giving selves. And vice versa. Life itself is always more checkered and impossible than human life. The sheer opulence of the flow of life always manages to hoodwink the idealist hubris that comes with the valourization of humanity. We can feel the power of exasperation, bitterness and canniness right within us. Throbbing, breathing realities all — no question of purifying such impulses by summoning our better angels. The motivations of our idealism and our visceral pull to the deepest forms of hostility are intertwined — that way the impulse of counter-romanticism lies. Idealism is precisely no illusion since it is paradoxically ignited by our daily encounters with our will to power, our fear of failure, our  retributive moves, our gloating at success, unleashing of our animal spirits — all part of our existence and as such, are the ideologemes that make up our very continuance.

(Re-printed with the publisher's permission.)