Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 It is hard to establish that Parthasarathy was a born synaesthete like Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, and et al. Nor is he known for his any “remarkable tricks of synesthesia” (Ackerman, ibid.) like Dame Edith Sitwell who used to lie in an open coffin for a while to harness her senses before she started her writing, or Schiller who would keep rotten apples in his desk drawer and sniff the intense smell to discover the right word to use in his poetry. But Parthasarathy’s liking for synaesthesia is also testified in his another exquisitely beautiful poem “Remembered Village”, where the poet disgusted with the priest’s erroneous Sanskrit in the temple hears ‘Bells curl up their lips’. It shows the transference of both epithet and sense. Preoccupied with the prospects of transferred sense the poet also sniffs the odorous howls of the stray dogs outside: A black pillaiyar temple squats at one end of the village – stone drum that is beaten thin on festivals by the devout. Bells curl their lips at the priest’s rustic Sanskrit. Outside, pariah dogs kick up an incense of howls. May be all this is a case of acquired synaesthesia, or the poet consciously affects synaesthetic experiences. The effects of the physical love as celebrated by the speaker here also seem to be similar to those of LSD synaesthesia. Contemporary medical research on hallucinogens shows that a man on LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) may have synaesthetic experience. Dutch author and scientific researcher Crétien van Campen records: […………………….]Often I read wild-sounding descriptions by poets proclaiming the merits of their drug-induced synesthesia, and then I’d switch to science and read the pharmacology and neurology of the same experience and compare notes. The writings in both sections made it clear to me that there is definitely a special relationship between drugs and synes-thesia, but that relationship turns out to be quite different from what I expected.( 104) He also observes: In eighteenth-century England, opium was considered a normal medicine and was used in much the same way that people use aspirin today: opium was considered a good remedy for pain, fatigue, and depression and could be obtained at the local shop. [……………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………] Several English writers and poets of the Romantic period wrote about their opium experiences, including Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, George Crabbe, and Francis Thompson. Their descriptions some-times include visions that remind me of contemporary reports by synesthetes. For instance, the poet and opium addict Francis Thompson (1859– 1907) noted on one occasion that he saw the sun rise “with a clash of cymbals”; on another occasion, he described how “tunes rose in twirls of gold” when “light through the petals of a buttercup clanged like a beaten gong.” He also heard “the enameled tone of shallow flute, and the furry richness of clarinet”. (ibid.) Vol. II. Issue. III 66 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Nowhere can be found any mention of parthathasarathy’s being addicted to any such hallucinogen, although Nissim Ezekiel, one of his contemporaries is said to have experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. Pritha Chakravorty in her essay “Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)” records: The 1960s brought major change in his [Ezekiel’s] lifestyle, turning a sceptical rationalist into drug-taking promiscuous believer. In 1967while in America, he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, probably as a means to expand his writing skills. (65) And if Parthasarathy be an addict he was addicted to love as recorded in “Exile”: as I walk, my tongue hunchbacked with words, towards Jadavpur to your arms. You smell of gin and cigarette ash. Your breasts, sharp with desire, hurt my fingers. Feelings beggar description… (Rough Passage 76) To suppress the agony of exile he uses physical love as a drug or hallucinogen, which results in love as a synaesthetic experience. The excitement of love is so much that one sense overlaps another, creating a sense of confusion as it happens in case of a man on LSD. Nandini Sahu observes: It [“Trial”] is a series of 15 love songs suffused with passion and sensuousness. The poet accepts love because it offers him an “unspeakable relief” at the most needed moments. Thus the period of exile becomes a period of conceptualisation. As a development to it, “Trial” is an effort at recapitulation of the poet’s youth against the background of the misery and loneliness he underwent during the period of exile. It is an attempt to bring meaning to the present by reassessing the past and by giving shape to his early youth. (84-85) However, the speaker is also aware of the inadequacies of love as a synaesthetic experience: [……….] thus celebrate Something so perishable, trite. (Rough Passage 80) It is invigorating and refreshing, but transitory. Regarding this Prof. P. K.J. Kurup rightly comments: One can go on citing examples showing conflicting passions within the poetic self where the invigorating and refreshing quality of love is juxtaposed with the transitoriness of bodily fulfilment and with the image of death and despair. The predominant voice in each case is one of modern melancholic experience of disappointment with an irritable and unprotesting glumness and a blead recognition of the self’s and life’s own limitations. (261) Vol. II. Issue. III 67 September 2011
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