Disclaimer
Poetry is open to interpretation, as is any work of art. We do not always have to rigidly follow the rules or second guess what the poet had in mind while creating the same. How can art pale or lose its value when compared to the poet's personal idiosyncrasies? When I see Keats, I can only see the beauty that was born out of his tragic life (if you call his life tragic at all) and the fact that he was aware of his misery and yearning (as is evident from most of his works) and chose to express it. Whether or not one sees beauty in his poetry (or in anything around one) lies solely on the perception and conditioning of the individual - it does not reflect the worthlessness of the object. What one sees in a piece of art, is reflective of the kind of person one is. It does not reflect the absolute value of the piece in question.
I was wielding the staff called the freedom of interpretation in my previous post. I am thoroughly aware of the context of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. But what if unrequitted love is frozen in time? Won't the lover always find the object of his affection beautiful? He does not know the answer and yet is it not far better than a 'No' or better still than growing weary of the same love, if reciprocated? I found it analogous to the carving on the Grecian Urn, of the lover about to kiss the fair maiden and yet he does not. He would never know the pleasure of the kiss and for the same reason, he would never outgrow it, as it merely plays in his imagination. It is this fever of anticipation that piqued my interest and I found it comparable to unconfessed love.
I sometimes wonder about the day after love is reciprocated. What next? Where do people go from 'happily ever after'? Sometimes, it occurs to me that the gnawing misery of secrecy and the stuttering poetry of unrequitted love is far better than disillusionment after love, the phase when one grows weary of the other, when one realises that love is not all it is made out to be. But then again, the gentle reader may argue, 'Why should there be disillusionment at all?' I request such a reader to remember it is the cynic in me that is waxing eloquent here.
I was wielding the staff called the freedom of interpretation in my previous post. I am thoroughly aware of the context of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. But what if unrequitted love is frozen in time? Won't the lover always find the object of his affection beautiful? He does not know the answer and yet is it not far better than a 'No' or better still than growing weary of the same love, if reciprocated? I found it analogous to the carving on the Grecian Urn, of the lover about to kiss the fair maiden and yet he does not. He would never know the pleasure of the kiss and for the same reason, he would never outgrow it, as it merely plays in his imagination. It is this fever of anticipation that piqued my interest and I found it comparable to unconfessed love.
I sometimes wonder about the day after love is reciprocated. What next? Where do people go from 'happily ever after'? Sometimes, it occurs to me that the gnawing misery of secrecy and the stuttering poetry of unrequitted love is far better than disillusionment after love, the phase when one grows weary of the other, when one realises that love is not all it is made out to be. But then again, the gentle reader may argue, 'Why should there be disillusionment at all?' I request such a reader to remember it is the cynic in me that is waxing eloquent here.
Meera @ 10:28 AM| permalink
9 Comments:
"Love is not all it is made out to be" - Ah, but it is more than what we can understand or make out to be. I think our frustration in not being able to understand it is what brings out the cynic in us sometimes :-)
Sometimes, familiarity can bring about a strange bonding and deep passion that mere initial curiosity cannot touch.
Quite interesting to read the comments section in the previous post.
One thing about art is that it is subjective. So tastes differ and all that.But saying that "What one sees in a piece of art, is reflective of the kind of person one is. It does not reflect the absolute value of the piece in question." is not quite true.Other than the value we give any object, it doesnt have any absolute value by itself.They dont even exist outside our consciousness, right?
So anything can pass off as a work of art under the guise that it is all subjective. Piccasso is a good example.
A quick clarification - my comments to the last post were not meant to be a criticism of your interpretation of Keats - I quite agree that interpretation is one of the valid (if not the chief) joys that poetry affords us, and I quite enjoyed your take on the "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss" bit. I was just being pedantic because it's something to do.
If you're ever feeling less cynical, though, you may want to check out Tennyson 'Ulysses' (Ashok, if you're reading this, look away now):
"all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things"
That's where we go on the morning after.
random thoughts:
one does outgrow imaginations. :) nothing is frozen in time!! and so, there is no "happily ever after" since there is no (frozen) "ever after".
there is no absolute happiness in any one state. there is always a mixture of emotions, experiences. we fail (deliberately?) to recall the totality of emotions and freeze at one emotion-association. even that feeling changes with time - imagination plays.
the day after love is reciprocated is the day to seek new love - either in the same person or in some other: depends on what experience and emotions one prefers.
one grows weary only when the mind
has the illusion of the static (past?) identity of a dynamic life/person. disillusionment is not after love, disillusionment is because of love and togetherness - a constructive process which urges us to look beyond. (intimacy with 'functions and limits' should lead you to calculus, to expect 'limits' to be everlasting is to hinder progress! :))
desires can be outgrown by indulgence, thereby leading to newer desires. a "frozen" desire thwarts the creation of newer desires which may be more fulfilling.
I personally think that in the spirit of interpretations, we should not forget to take into mind the personality of the author of the art. For example, in Kambharamaayanam, there is an instance when Khambar says, "Thaam arai kanghalaal Noakinaal"..here there are two different meanings possible...it can be "thaam(meaning- their's) arai(half-opened or closed) kanghalaal(with eyes) noakinaal(saw him).." that translates into seeing it with half-closed eyes due to shyness...or it can also be interpreted as"thaamarai" meaning Lotus...n it is a well established tradition to compare a lotus to female's eyes in Tamil literature....now, apart from the beauty of the verses, there are enough possible reasons to interpret that in any way you want...here both the interpretations are beautifull...so we tend to praise Kambhan for his mastery over language n blah..blah..blah...what if the meanings had been a bit more sleazy...there are more than enough evidence for that too....now, in the name of individual interpretations, it would do no justice to either the poet or the poetry to vulgarise it..there might be reasons for the poet to write what he had written.
while we are free to interpret the words in whatever way we want, we need to keep in mind the context and the author to interpret it in the way it was meant to be interpreted...though it is true that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, it needs to do justice to the author too...
Meera!
I've been wondering why I haven't heard back from you, since you took the time to write. I had thought, perhaps, my own tardiness in replying to you might be to blame, but I see you been busy muddying up the waters again, O cynical Apsara.
Factum bene! Euge! But alas, I can contribute little to the discussion. I've never been much on the subjectivity of art, but incline to Jaques Maritain's view:
"The philosophers tell us that art consists essentially, not in performing a moral act, but in making a thing, a work, in making an object with a view not to the human good of the agent, but to the exigencies and the proper good of the object to be made, and by employing ways of realization predetermined by the nature of the object in question.
Art thus appears as something foreign in itself to the sphere of the human good, almost as something inhuman, and whose exigencies nevertheless are absolute: for, needless to say, there are not two ways of making an object well, of realizing well the work one has conceived -- there is but one way, and it must not be missed." (An Essay on Art, Art and Scholasticism, 1935
Write when you can,
semper idem,
Iohannes
At any point, nothing can beat the Ode on the Grecian Urn by Keats. As u said, its always open to interpretation... and the beauty lies in that!
Very simply put, the phrase would be 'Think Beyond'. Love doesnt end when reciprocated, it continues, thats what makes it more special. The beauty lies in stopping and thinking back on a particular frozen point of time, like Keats had expressed!
"the phase when one grows weary of the other, when one realises that love is not all it is made out to be. But then again, the gentle reader may argue, 'Why should there be disillusionment at all?' I request such a reader to remember it is the cynic in me that is waxing eloquent here."
Do not be harsh on yourself cos u refer to the disillusionment of love that follows reciprocation.. this disillusionment definitely occurs and it occurs even with the best of people.. but let not this overshadow the beauty of love.. cos there is a phase beyond this disillusionment, a phase where u learn to accept the person as he/she is and understand love as it is - not as u have imagined it to be. This love is not the adrenalin rush u feel when on a roller coaster, it is the sea breeze that washes over you as you walk along the coast.
Hope my views do not seem idealistic. This was my first time at your blog and I truly enjoyed reading your posts.
Meera, just a quick note to ask you to post two lines to let us know that you are OK. My heart goes out to you and everyone in Mumbai during these terrible times. Take care.
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